







































































































































































































I OB' 

















































































































































































ONE OF THE ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY BUDDHIST TEMPLES ON THE 

ISLAND OF PU-TO. 


© Ewing Galloway 









CHINA’S REAL 
REVOLUTION 

BY ,/ 

PAUL HUTCHINSON 


I 


MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 
OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 
New York 


2 / 


COPYRIGHT, 
1924, BY 
MISSIONARY 
EDUCATION 
MOVEMENT 
OF THE 
UNITED STATES 
AND CANADA 


Printed in the 
United States 
of America 







MAY -8 


1 



©Cl A7 0320 0 

M f 7 ^ 




To 

A. M. H. 


Whose heart is in China 



CHAPTER 

CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I 

If Marco Polo Should Come Back 

1 

II 

Saved by Its Students 

17 

III 

A Land of Fermenting Minds 

38 

IV 

“Prove All Things” 

60 

V 

China’s New Women 

84 

VI 

Beneath the Smokestacks 

106 

VII 

The Struggle for Faith 

131 

VIII 

America and China’s Revolution . 

155 


Reading List 

178 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


FACING PAGE 

A Buddhist Temple Frontispiece 

Golden Island Temple.6 

A Houseboat in the Interior .... 7 

Student Political Demonstration . 22 

Laboratory Work in China . .23 

A Schoolgirl in China.38 

Magazines of New China . . . . 39 

Pastor Ting Li-mei.54 

Group of Schoolboys.55 

On the Wrong Side of the Fence . . 70 

In Funeral Procession.71 

In a Cotton Mill.118 

On the Hankow Water-front . . . .119 

A Chinese Christian Nurse . . . .134 

A Road to Friendship . . . . .135 

























PREFACE 


Something is happening these days in China. 
Any newspaper reader knows that. Talk of “rev¬ 
olution,” or “uprising,” or “disorder,” is printed so 
continually that the West has come to think of China 
as in constant turmoil, although the West has little 
idea as to what the turmoil is all about. 

There really is a revolution taking place in China. 
It cannot be comprehended in any account of mili¬ 
tary adventures, or in the rise and fall of politicians. 
It cannot be dated on any calendar. It is hard to 
say of it “Lo, here” and “Lo, there.” But the rev¬ 
olution is making progress, just the same. 

It is the attempt of this book to throw a bit of 
light upon what this revolution really is. The 
author knows well enough how hopeless such an 
attempt must be, for China is so vast, and some of 
the forces of change are at work so silently and so 
deep down in the national life that no picture can 
give a complete understanding. However, if by 
these sketches of recent movements among the stu¬ 
dents, among the women, in the homes, in the fac¬ 
tories, and in the churches, any reader is given a 
faint suggestion of what China’s real revolution is, 
the author’s purpose will have been achieved. 

My thanks must be given the Atlantic Monthly 
for permission to reprint from a previous article as 
[ix] 


PREFACE 


part of the seventh chapter of this book. The Mac¬ 
millan Company has granted the right to quote from 
Dr. M. T. Z. Tyau’s China Awakened , and the Ab¬ 
ingdon Press from Stanley High’s Revolt of Youth . 
From workers of the Young Women’s Christian As¬ 
sociation I have received much material on modern 
conditions, especially those having to do with in¬ 
dustry. 

P. H. 

Chicago 

February 

1924 


[x] 


I 


IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 

We stepped from the shaded quiet of the section 
about the British consulate into the glare and uproar 
of the Chinkiang waterfront. It was past ten, and 
already the sun, reflected from the muddied mirror 
of the Yangtse, was hot. 

My friend shrugged his shoulders, as one who 
would say, “There’s no help for it,” and plunged 
into that shrieking bedlam. I followed as closely 
as I could, but it would have taken a better halfback 
than I am not to have been cut loose from his inter¬ 
ference. I could only plow ahead through the mass 
of half-clad, sweating boatmen, confident that, some¬ 
where ahead, I should catch up with Dodd. 

We were making our way out a narrow pontoon 
that stretched between the shore and an anchored 
hulk at which the river steamers stopped. On both 
sides the junks were jammed in as thickly as the 
Yangtze could bear them. Some were laden, and 
their masters bargained olf their contents to buyers 
on the pontoon or in other boats. Some were empty, 
waiting for a load, whether passengers or freight. 

Scarcely had we left the shore when we were 
seen and our purpose deduced. Dodd had made 
that trip too many times before to be able to con- 
[ 1 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

ceal his objective. Immediately a shouting horde 
of boatmasters started toward him, intent upon rent¬ 
ing their junks for the trip down the river. 

Dodd had his favorites. Two of them were tied 
up now, and, fighting off the rest of the crowd as, 
in the famine days, the hungry had to be pushed 
away from the supplies in North China, Dodd dick¬ 
ered with the pair until he had struck a bargain with 
the smaller. 

Instantly the clamor ceased. In an incredible 
silence we dropped on the deck of the little junk, 
her four-man crew swarmed aboard and threw off 
the hawser ropes, and in a few moments, having 
wormed our way through the encompassing craft, 
we were scudding downstream. 

It was hot, but not so hot as we had expected. The 
Yangtze must be nearly a mile wide about here, and 
a fair breeze can generally be found in a corridor 
of that size. Besides, the swiftness of the current 
was sufficient to make some breeze of our own. 

Three miles or so below us—it was impossible to 
judge distance accurately through the heat over that 
stretch of water—was the tree-covered rock that 
formed our goal, Silver Island. I had been tramp¬ 
ing around with Dodd since earliest dawn, looking 
at temple after temple, poking down one stone- 
paved street after another, pausing by such a Chris¬ 
tian holy spot as the grave of Hudson Taylor. And 
I was tired. My feet were tired. My eyes were 
tired. My mind was tired. I was perfectly will- 
12 ] 


IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 


ing to believe that there were a thousand Buddhist 
temples and ten thousand Buddhist priests in and 
about Chinkiang without carrying my personal sur¬ 
vey any further. 

“Can’t we get out of all this?” I asked Dodd. 
I might have gone on to tell him that I thought 
his the dirtiest, hottest, dreariest city I had seen, 
but some lingering remnant of sense restrained me. 
For a missionary will contend for the fair name of 
“his” town if it is the veriest scum-hole. I didn’t 
tell Dodd what I thought of Chinkiang; I just asked 
him if there wasn’t some way of getting out of it. 
And he suggested Silver Island. 

“There’s an island a few miles down the river,” 
he told me. “Covered with trees and temples and 
all that sort of thing. You’ll find more priests there. 
But they’re a better sort than these grafters who 
stick about the city. It’s a monastery, you know, 
and the chaps there are really seeking peace. It’s 
quiet, and it’s generally cool. And we can stay 
there until evening and then have our junk dragged 
back up after sunset. Want to try it?” 

Did I ? Even that milling mob at the river bank, 
had I known it lay between me and a cool spot on 
the river, would hardly have deterred me. And I 
did not know. 

Larger and larger grew the island as our junk 
drew near. At first it had seemed just a mass of 
green. Then the outline of temples and shrines 
could be seen, hidden among the trees and rocks. 

[3] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


Once or twice the glint of a gilded character on a » 
lacquered shrine inscription shone out. The dull 
gray robe of a priest passed from the shadow through 
a bit of sunshine, and disappeared again. 

Suddenly the water swarmed about the low rail, 
and our crew dashed madly from one part of the 
deck to another, shouting unintelligibly. Only the 
helmsman remained calm as we were caught in the 
swirling eddies formed where the mighty river 
smashed and sucked at the defiant rock-island. Ap¬ 
parently we were being driven straight upon this 
unyielding wall, when, at the last moment, to the 
triumphant shouts of the boatmen, a current swept 
us around a corner and alongside a pier, where lay 
brothers quickly made us fast. 

And then peace came down upon us as though 
we had been suddenly wrapped in some magic man¬ 
tle. There was a great banyan tree rooting out 
through the flagstones of the jetty casting its coolness 
over us and the water all about us. Back of the 
tree was a wide doorway, with a plant-lined court¬ 
yard beyond. Beyond that another tree, and beyond 
that the dark restfulness of one of the monastery 
buildings. 

There is little formality about entering such a 
home of quiet. One or two of the monks come for¬ 
ward with a conventional word of greeting. Perhaps 
they speak the mystic “O ml to fu” that is more 
frequently upon their lips than any other phrase. 
You have only to reply with a courteous sentence or 
[4] 


IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 


so, and before you know it, you will find yourselves 
in a guest room with the inevitable tea before you. 

Hot tea is, I think, the most cooling drink on 
earth. Take it in a cup without handles; a cup that 
has a cover to make sure that none of the virtue 
escapes. Be sure that it is real China tea, a pale 
yellow, with perhaps a bit of jasmine floating about 
to add to the flavor. Never pollute it with sugar 
or, what is worse, cream. Step from the glare of 
the Oriental sun into the shade of some roadside 
inn or temple. Drink it fearlessly, knowing that no 
germ could endure in its scalding depths. New life 
will come flooding into you, and you will have dis¬ 
covered, as the Chinese did millenniums ago, the 
perfect drink. 

Foreign visitors did not come every day to the 
Silver Island monastery. It was not long before the 
abbot himself had been brought to sit with us. I 
found it hard to believe, despite Dodd’s assurances, 
that this youngerly, cultivated, spare man could be 
at the head of the extensive establishment. My 
mental picture of an abbot had been far different. 

The abbot, it developed, had been well educated. 
For a time he had been in politics. But the seamy 
side of public life, with the upset conditions of the 
country, had disheartened him, and he had sought 
in this monastery soul-satisfaction through days of 
inner contemplation. I gathered that his personal 
powers had brought him rapidly to his position. 

We talked about the war. The world struggle 

[5] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


was entering its last stages, and the abbot, for all 
his retirement, had been reading and thinking about 
this convulsion that was being felt even on the far¬ 
ther rim of Asia. In a way that bore not a trace 
of irony or enmity he asked how we reconciled our 
religion with what the Christian nations were doing. 
He knew enough of “the Jesus doctrine” to feel 
that there was something wrong somewhere. I fear 
our answers gave him little light. 

“It must be with nations as it is with men,” the 
abbot commented, after long moments of silence. 
“All are bound on the wheel of desire.” 

After lunch—a silent, abstemious, vegetarian meal 
—the abbot again sought us out. 

“Would you like to see some of our treasures?” 
he asked. 

Now Dodd had already told me a few things 
about the treasures of the monastery, and I was 
eager to see them with my own eyes. What they 
were I cannot now in detail recall. Some of them 
were for ritualistic purposes. More were just things 
of beauty. All had been presented by those who 
felt they had some favor to repay. I remember 
one belt, all of jade, the gift of an emperor who 
must have been almost a contemporary of Charle¬ 
magne. Safe in the middle of the river, the priests 
had for centuries kept these things from the looting 
that has despoiled so much of the country. 

“All these gifts must be very old,” I ventured. 

“Not all of them,” the abbot replied. “Some of 

[ 6 ] 



GOLDEN ISLAND TEMPLE ON THE YANGTZE. 




















• <• 




r-" 


■ - 

‘ . 

n'\ v«X- V - X\^ ' 









IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 


them are truly ancient. And most of them have 
been here at least since the time of Marco Polo.” 

“Marco Polo! Was he here?” 

“Oh, yes5 have you not read his voyages?” 

I had, after a fashion. But the names used by 
the Venetian traveler in the thirteenth century had 
been so different from those used today that I had 
never obtained any clear idea as to the places Polo 
visited. 

“It is easy to distinguish Chinkiang,” objected the 
abbot. “Marco Polo tells us of Kayn-gui, at the 
place where the Grand Canal crosses the great river. 
Where can that be but Chinkiang? 

“And do you not remember the way in which he 
speaks of f he temple?” the abbot persisted. 

I had to admit that I did not, whereupon he be¬ 
gan to quote a passage that was evidently as familiar 
to him as one of the Sutras: 

“In the midst of the river, opposite the city of 
Kayn-gui, there is an island entirely of rock, upon 
which are built a grand temple and monastery, where 
two hundred monks, as they may be termed, reside 
and perform service to the idols; and this is the 
supreme head of many other temples and monas¬ 
teries.” 

“Was it this temple that Marco Polo referred 
to?” I asked. 

“Probably not,” the abbot answered. “Marco 
Polo was here. That we know. But you see he 
speaks of this temple as being opposite the city, not 

[ 7 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


several miles below it. I think he must have meant 
the Golden Island temple.” 

“But the Golden Island temple is not on an 
island,” I objected. 

“So you have been there, have you? True, the 
Golden Island temple is not on an island, now. But 
it was when Marco Polo saw it. The great river 
has carried in so much silt in these centuries that 
now it is fastened to the rest of the country.” 

“Time brings its changes, even in China, doesn’t 
it?” 

The abbot’s eyes twinkled. He would not utter 
Buddhist heresy, even to a foreigner. 

“It may seem so, outside the temple,” he an¬ 
swered. “But within, all is the same.” 

It was true. I had been at Golden Island temple. 
Still the two hundred priests, or even more. Still 
the gilded gods, towering through the gloom of the 
windowless room. Still the rise and fall of the 
chants; the boom of the drum; the note of the bell. 
Still the incense. Still the prostrations. Still, in 
the court without, the awed faces of curious chil¬ 
dren. “All is the same.” 

In a little while I wandered off alone among the 
trees, past innumerable shrines, pausing now and 
then to try to decipher the inscriptions cut in the 
rocks, and climbing gradually, until I came out on 
the very top. Off to the west, on the southern bank 
of the river, lay the city. At one edge the pagoda 
that crowns the Golden Island temple stood blackly 
[ 8 ] 


IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 

against the raw sunlight. At the other edge I could 
see the roofs of a mission hospital, standing atop a 
hill that I knew was pock-marked with graves. And 
the hospital, I knew, was vacant. 

Sitting in the shade, I found it hard to focus my 
eyes on that city that I knew was sweltering in the 
dazzling sunshine. It proved easier to lie down 
and to think of the city as it must have been when 
Marco Polo saw it. 

Marco Polo! What a liar they had thought him, 
when he came back to Venice to tell of cities such 
as Europe did not dream, of silks and merchandise 
so rare that few princes could aspire to their pos¬ 
session, and of a monarch so powerful that Europe’s 
proudest king would appear a beggar in his presence. 

“The Great Khan,” Polo had declared, “may be 
called a perfect alchemist, for he makes his own 
money. He orders the people to collect the bark 
of a certain tree, whose leaves are eaten by the worms 
that spin silk. The thin rind between the bark and 
the interior wood is taken, and from it cards are 
formed like those of paper, all black. All these 
cards are stamped with the Khan’s seal, and so many 
are fabricated that they would buy all the treasuries 
in the world. All the nations under his sway receive 
and pay this money for their merchandise, gold, 
silver, precious stones, and whatever they transport, 
buy, or sell. In this manner the great sire possesses 
all the gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones in his 
dominions. This is the reason why the Khan has 

[ 9 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

more treasure than any other lord in the world, nay, 
all the princes in the world together have not an 
equal amount.” 

Of course, a man who would talk like that to 
Venice, Venice of the thirteenth century, must be a 
liar. But he wasn’t. To be sure, he may have 
embroidered the strict truth here and there a bit, 
as exclusive observers of other wonders in our own 
time have been suspected of doing. But the essen¬ 
tial facts were as Polo reported them. The cities 
were really in existence 5 the wealth of Cathay was 
no myth 5 the power of the Mongol emperors was 
very nearly equal to that of all the other rulers in 
the world. 

Traveling in Marco Polo’s day was the real thing 
in the way of adventure. Three and a half years 
from Venice to Peking! How things have changed! 
Fifteen days is long enough to cross the Pacific now, 
and it’s only a couple of days from Peking to 
Shanghai, if the bandits don’t interfere with the 
train schedule. Marco Polo would rub his eyes if 
he could come back to his beloved Cathay. 

And yet, would he? Have things changed so 
much after all? So I thought as I lay there day¬ 
dreaming atop that island in the Yangtze that after¬ 
noon. Suppose, for instance, that Polo should come 
back to Hangchow, that city over which for several 
years he ruled as the representative of the Mongol 
emperor. Would it seem, very different to him? 

Polo wrote of it as “a very noble citv named 

[ 10 ] 


IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 


Kinsai, which means in our language the city o£ 
heaven. And I will tell you about its nobleness, 
for without doubt it is the finest city in the world.” 
Well, New York and London and Paris and Buenos 
Aires and some others might challenge that now. 
But the Chinese still speak of Hangchow as a heav¬ 
enly city; they are still ready, after they have seen 
it, to die. 

Undoubtedly, Marco, should he return just now, 
would find Hangchow a bit down at the heel. It is 
certainly not “one hundred miles in circumference,” 
as he said it was, and he could never locate to-day 
his “twelve thousand stone bridges.” But the rest 
of the picture would be much the same. 

There would still be the beauties of the lake and 
temples and monasteries, beauties such as are to be 
found in few other spots. There would still be the 
shops with their exquisite craftmanship. There 
would still be the honest, lustrous silks, making up 
into the richest of garments. There would still be 
the pagodas, silent sentinels of the spirits of wind 
and water. 

As Polo wandered by the river, the junks would 
look unchanged, with their high after-decks and their 
square-rigged sails. In the spring he would see the 
farmers planting their rice in the same sort of 
flooded paddy fields, while in other fields the water 
buffalo would still be lumbering along waist deep, 
dragging the unwieldy plow through the muck be¬ 
hind him. 


[ 11 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


The same canals would wander about, carrying 
most of the heavy traffic. Here and there along the 
banks the same sort of mulberry trees would rear 
their twisted branches. Along the narrow footpaths 
the coolies would still be pushing their wheelbar¬ 
rows, and the agonized shriek of the axles would 
protest that not a drop of oil had been used upon 
them in all the seven intervening centuries. 

When the day grew hot, the traveler would step 
into the same sort of little inns he knew before. 
Here he would still have to pick his way through 
wheelbarrows, sedan chairs, bundles, benches, babies, 
loafers, dogs, other animals, and a patron or so, 
until he found a table that suited him, where he 
would sit to drink his tea. It would all be familiar. 

The temples, too, would not have changed much. 
Some of them would have a run-down appearance. 
Especially would this be true of the Taoist shrines. 
The Confucian temples might be employed as bar¬ 
racks; here and there a Buddhist temple would be 
without its attendant. Some of the Buddhist tem¬ 
ples would, however, look very spic and span. Great 
timbers imported from a state he had never heard 
of, called Oregon, would be seen, bearing aloft roofs 
that had begun to sag. But, on the whole, there 
would be little change. The general design would 
be the same, the outer courts with their hideous idol 
guardians of the portal, and the inner sanctuary 
with the deities in whose especial honor the temple 
existed. 


[ 12 ] 


IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 


Marco Polo might be surprised if he chanced upon 
that temple in Hangchow that contains what pur¬ 
ports to be an image of himself, now properly ex¬ 
alted to the level of an “enlightened one.” But he 
should recognize in that only the same tendency to 
make obeisance before any possible source of spiritual 
help that marked his own career. 

“The Christians worship Christ; the Saracens, 
Mohammed; the Jews, Moses; the idolaters, Sogo- 
mombar Khan,” Polo wrote. “I honor and respect 
all the four, and seek aid from them, as any one 
of them may really be supreme in heaven.” One 
wonders if the Venetian, having noticed the readi¬ 
ness of the Chinese to consult any priest that offers, 
picked up his religious eclecticism in China. 

But while much of the daily life of the country 
—the buying and selling, the marrying and bury¬ 
ing, the planting and reaping—would remain almost 
the same, Polo would find plenty of other changes 
to challenge his attention. 

Were he traveling from Peking to Hangchow 
to-day he might make the journey in de luxe trains 
and river steamers. Not far away from the great 
pagoda of Hangchow he would find a Christian 
college, and in its halls the Chinese student of the 
present would not be howling out the precepts of 
the ancients, but would be tracing down chemical 
formulas and studying political economy. 

Marco Polo would find no king in Hangchow 
now, nor any viceroy in the chair of state he once 

[ 13 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

filled. Instead, he would see a five-barred flag, and 
would be told of an attempt to build a Chung Hwa 
Ming Kuo , a “Middle Flowery People’s Country.” 
This idea he would find so deeply rooted that even 
the disorders of a decade of rather more or less 
bungling attempts at democratic government had not 
dislodged it. 

The old city wall might still stand, but it would 
be a very different city within the wall. And if he 
left Hangchow, in many places, notably the port 
cities, he would find the walls demolished and build¬ 
ings torn down in order that broad boulevards might 
displace tortuous alleys. The new streets would 
be straight, despising the ancient superstition that 
had caused the mazes in which evil spirits were sure 
to lose themselves. Here and there a building 
would rise three and four stories high. Some of 
these would house department stores—shops on a 
scale to have impressed even the Great Khan. Once 
in a while the Venetian might even see a grandsire 
with his ears in a headpiece, listening in on the 
broadcasting from Shanghai! 

The clatter of the hand-loom would still sound 
in many streets, but there would also be great brick 
and concrete buildings, out of which would come 
the thunder of the power looms, driven day and 
night. The wheelbarrow would have given place 
to the pneumatic-tired ricksha, and the ricksha, in 
turn, would see its supremacy passing as the broader 
streets brought in the automobile. 

[H] 


IF MARCO POLO SHOULD COME BACK 


There would be daily newspapers and moving 
picture theaters, playgrounds and athletic fields, hos¬ 
pitals and street dispensaries, patent medicine adver¬ 
tisements and offers of painless dentistry, here and 
there a Christian church or a philanthropic institu¬ 
tion of some kind, the Christian Associations for 
young men and young women, electric light plants, 
cigarette stores, lottery agencies, labor union head¬ 
quarters ; in short, such a conglomeration of unac¬ 
customed elements as would make Marco Polo 
wonder whether, after all, he had come back to the 
same country he left so long ago. 

I think that it would frighten Polo a little bit 
if he were to return to China today. For he knew 
the country intimately enough to understand what 
some of the problems are when a land of this size 
starts changing. But, after he had been in China 
a few months, I am sure that he would take heart. 
For he would find that these changes are not all on 
the surface. He would find them deep down at 
the heart of China’s life. And, finding them there, 
he would be wise enough to see in them their prom¬ 
ise of ultimate salvation. 

All these and a lot of other ideas ran through 
my head that summer afternoon as I drowsed there 
on the island-top, looking off occasionally toward 
the city where Polo himself had walked so many 
centuries before. And even after the shadows had 
grown long and cool across the grass, and Dodd and 
I had said our farewells, and the boatmen had com- 

[ 15 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


menced their gallant battle homeward against the 
current, the notion of the change that Marco Polo 
would find, were he to return, did not leave me. 
It has not left me yet, as this will prove. 

It is about this change that I write. Some people 
speak of it as a “revolution.” It is a revolution, but 
there have gathered about that word connotations 
that make us think of battles, frenzied uprisings, 
overthrown governments, and like political explo¬ 
sions. There have been some political explosions 
in China in the past few years. There will be some 
more. But it is not with these that we are now pri¬ 
marily concerned. We think of China’s real revo¬ 
lution, and that is something that is taking place far 
below the political surface of her life. 

Let anything happen that concerns China’s politi¬ 
cal revolution, and the newspapers of the world will 
print more or less accurate accounts tomorrow. But 
frequently the newspapers miss the changes that 
mark this deeper revolution that is a thousand times 
more important. And it is the person who does not 
know about this deeper revolution who loses con¬ 
fidence in China’s future. 

China has a great future. She will play her part 
manfully in the brotherhood of peoples. And she 
will do so because, even in this hour of confusion, 
at the center of her life, there are preparing changes 
that will fit her for a new day. 


[ 16 ] 


II 


SAVED BY ITS STUDENTS 

Suppose you had been chief of police in Peking 
about the end of May, 1919. How many times a 
day would you have written your resignation? 

Ordinarily, a job as chief of police is not to be 
despised. Not only are there power and prestige and 
a good salary attached to the office, but frequently 
there are many of those shadowy things known as 
“perquisites” that outweigh all the rest in value. 
That is as true in Peking as in Paris or Portland or 
Pittsburgh. 

But being chief of police in Peking in May, 1919, 
was something else again. And, if the truth must 
be told, never since that day has the office fully re¬ 
gained its old glamour. It isn’t an honor any more; 
it’s a hardship. It has been ever since the days of 
the First Student Strike. 

The chief of police was sitting in his office that 
May morning, a slightly puzzled frown lightly 
marking his ordinarily impassive features. He had 
been going through a trying month. News of the 
decision of the Paris Peace Conference to award the 
old German colony of Kiaochow to Japan had sent 
thousands of Chinese students off into a perfect 
frenzy of protest. And if reports were to be be¬ 
lieved, it looked as though the students in Peking 
were the most frenzied of the lot! 

[ 17 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


It hadn’t been so bad at the start, just fifteen 
thousand students marching about the streets dis¬ 
playing banners of protest. Nobody would have 
paid much attention to that. But when they stormed 
the home of a cabinet minister; when they wrecked 
his reception rooms looking for that official; when 
they manhandled the minister to Tokyo found hid¬ 
ing there—that was another matter. What was a 
policeman to do then but to lock up as many of the 
rioters as possible? 

Then why all the uproar? Nothing had been 
proposed save a salutary admonishment, by means 
of the bamboo, to the thirty students captured. Why 
did that call for this strike? Why were all the 
schools still closed? At the very least, why hadn’t 
the students gone back to their classes when their 
fellows were released without having been punished? 

Yet they had not. They had not only stayed on 
strike—encouraged, the chief suspected, by their 
teachers—but they had made infernal nuisances of 
themselves by planting boxes every fifty yards or 
so along the streets and haranguing all who would 
listen on the perils of the country. If that sort of 
thing kept up, no one could tell what crazy ideas 
might be planted in the heads of the illiterate 
crowds, with results disastrous to all hands. 

Evidently the cabinet had felt the same way about 
it. At least, they had ordered that such demonstra¬ 
tions be brought to an end. A thousand marching 
students had been arrested two days ago in obedience 
[ 18 ] 


SAVED BY] ITS STUDENTS 


to this order. One would have thought that suffi¬ 
cient to have put a quietus on all this uproar. But 
instead, it had been necessary to arrest another thou¬ 
sand on the day following. 

If ever a “feller needed a friend,” that Peking 
police chief did. People, even in his own home, 
were beginning to look askance at him. Lads who 
seemed to him simply irresponsible young upstarts 
were being extolled in the newspapers as patriots. 
What was worse, his jails couldn’t hold all this 
crowd, and his commissary wasn’t ready to care for 
any such increased number of steady boarders. He 
hoped by all his ancestors that there would be no 
more arrests today. 

A knock at the door. A subordinate, smartly 
saluting, and barking out his report in that expres¬ 
sionless staccato characteristic of every army and 
police force in the world: “A delegation of students 
to see your excellency.” 

“I don’t want to see them.” 

“They say that they will wait until you leave, if 
necessary.” 

“I’ll go out the back way.” 

“Headquarters is surrounded on all sides.” 

“On all sides! How big is this delegation?” 

“Probably thirty thousand students.” 

“Thirty thousand? What are you saying? Why, 
that is every student in Peking!” 

“Sir, they are all here!” 

After that, what could the chief do but go out? 

[ 19 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


And, once he was out, and saw that mob of students, 
filling the courtyards and flowing away down the 
street in a mass that reached from wall to wall, is 
it to be wondered that he adopted a conciliatory 
tone? 

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked 
the little group that stood forward as leaders. 

“Lock us up!” 

“Lock you up! What for?” 

“For loving our country. For doing the same 
things that our two thousand fellow-students now 
in prison have done, working to protect our country 
from her enemies. If they are guilty, so are we. 
Lock us up!” 

And then the police chief surrendered. Begging 
for a moment’s respite, he withdrew into his private 
office, called certain chiefs of government to the tele¬ 
phone, explained how impossible it would be to 
care for another thirty thousand prisoners, told of 
the logical demands of the students, and asked what 
was to be done. In a few minutes more he returned 
to the waiting students to announce the release of 
their fellows. 

Four days later the cabinet members who had 
been branded by the students as “traitors” resigned. 
A new cabinet, supposedly more loyal to the interests 
of China, assumed power. The students went back 
to their classes. Shops that had closed as a sign 
of sympathy for their agitation reopened. The First 
[ 20 ] 


SAVED BY ITS STUDENTS 

Student Strike was at an end. It had shaken China, 
the unshakable, in exactly forty days! 

What did it all mean? 

Most of the newspapers that reported it saw it 
only as a strange political adventure on the part of 
a lot of adolescent boys and girls. They told of the 
soap boxes, and the violent speeches that were made 
from them. They translated the banners, and re¬ 
counted the way in which unbalanced youths had 
bitten off the ends of their fingers in order that their 
sentiments of patriotism might be written in blood. 
They described the noisy assurance with which 
youngsters in their teens had withstood their elders, 
the officials of the nation. And when the good peo¬ 
ple of America and England and other countries of 
the West read those reports they were likely to re¬ 
mark, “If our schoolboys ever tried anything like 
that, we’d take them out and spank them. That’s 
the way to deal with a situation of that kind.” 

But sometimes the newspapers, intent upon the 
surface sensation, do not catch the real significance 
of events. They did not during those early summer 
days in 1919 when the Student Movement first made 
itself felt in China. For that was not just a sample 
of unaccountable hysteria upon the part of unbal¬ 
anced youth. Thinking Chinese saw in it something 
far more important. They saw the reassertion of 
the ancient supremacy of the Chinese scholar! 

Was there ever another country like China in its 

[ 21 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


scale of social values? Perhaps Greece, in her 
Golden Age, came nearest to the same reverence for 
learning. But Greece was only a mite of a state, 
and she could not maintain her ideals long. China 
is a giant, sprawling across a quarter of Asia, and 
she held her ideals for thousands of years. 

There has been no hereditary nobility in China, 
barring the immediate family of the emperor. (The 
Manchus, as foreigners, stood outside the Chinese 
social order.) The scholar was the truly noble man, 
standing at the apex of society, no matter whether 
he had been born in the most obscure village in the 
most outlying province, and had but a single coat 
to his back. If he had scaled the highest scholastic 
rank, he might enter the presence of the emperor. 

And if you say that there was an exception to t ,s, 
a family in which ducal rank descended from father 
to son, then you must see that the very exception 
strengthens the case. For the family thus honored 
was that of China’s greatest sage, Confucius, the 
merit of whose wisdom was sufficient to carry down 
to his descendants throughout “ten thousand ages.” 

It seems to me that when we ask why China has 
been able to endure while all the other great civi¬ 
lizations have fallen, we must for much of the an¬ 
swer come back to this explanation. Think of a 
civilization—for China is as much a civilization as 
a nation—in which the scholar stands at the top, be¬ 
cause the educated man is acknowledged to be the 
most important element in the state; with the farmer 
[ 22 ] 



POLITICAL DEMONSTRATION IN WHICH THREE THOUSAND STUDENTS ENGAGED. 



THE MIND TO “PROVE ALL THINGS” DEVELOPS THROUGH LABORATORY WORK IN THE ORIENT AS WELL AS 

IN THE OCCIDENT. 







SAVED By ITS STUDENTS 

second, because he feeds men; with the artisan third, 
because he houses them; with the trader fourth, be¬ 
cause he carries on business, but below the others 
because of his temptations to buy for too little and 
sell for too much; and with the soldier at the very 
bottom, because he is a destroyer. Could a social 
order like that fail to endure? Within it there may 
be the greater part of the contribution that China 
is to make to a unified world. 

To be sure, the theory and the practice have not 
always been the same. There have been “strong 
men,” such as the Emperor Shih Elwang-ti, who 
started the building of the Great Wall, who have 
had no use for scholars and have tried to reverse 
such a mollycoddle conception of society. But never 
with any permanent success. “In a hundred years 
it will all be the same,” the familiar Chinese proverb 
has said. And at the end of the hundred years, sure 
enough, the scholar has assumed his sway once more. 

Within the last century or so, however, the sys¬ 
tem has gradually been crumbling. Bribery under¬ 
mined the honesty of the examinations in which those 
scholars were selected who were fit for preferment. 
“Pull” worked as banefully in the competitions 
within the ancient examination halls as it sometimes 
has in civil service tests in other countries. And 
when China was forced to deal with new types of 
national problems, because of the pushing in of the 
West, proficiency in expounding the “Eight-Legged 
Essay” and others of the classics written by sages 
[ 23 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


who lived millenniums ago, did not always prove a 
guarantee of administrative ability. 

It seems ridiculous to us, this old Chinese method 
of securing officials. Think of cooping a young man 
up in a little brick stall for three days, without room 
to lie down, with but a candle, a brush, ink and 
paper, and then, if he proved able to write as Con¬ 
fucius or Mencius or some other worthy wrote in the 
long ago, sending him out to a career that might 
make him minister of the navy, or put him in con¬ 
trol of the country’s mines! 

And yet, ridiculous as such a method was, it had 
its good results to show. Teachers in Western 
schools have sometimes said, in defending certain 
studies, that they had little value when it came to 
landing a job, but that the “mental discipline” in¬ 
volved made a contribution that would be of value 
all through life. So it must have been with the 
Chinese. There seems little connection between un¬ 
derstanding the “Eight-Legged Essay” and dealing 
with the problems of railway construction, but the 
mental discipline sometimes produced minds bright 
enough to grapple with almost any question. At the 
worst, the system was hardly more ridiculous than 
some that have been used by Westerners in the choice 
of their public servants. Think of requiring of a 
candidate for president that he should be one who 
never in his life had shown enough independence 
to scratch a straight party ticket! 

With the advent of the West in China, early in 

[ 24 ] 


SAVED by; its students 

the last century, the old order began to pass. The 
scholar still maintained his position, but there began 
to arise men who said that the test of scholarship 
must be very different from what it had been. Little 
by little they found place in the old, old language 
for a strange, new word, “science.” It was seen 
that while the Westerner was undoubtedly a bar¬ 
barian, knowing little of the social graces, yet he 
still had possessed himself of a number of things 
that enabled him to live in considerably more ease 
than the Chinese. And, after Hongkong had been 
cut off from China, and Tsingtau, and Indo-China, 
and Port Arthur, and the foreigner’s railways and 
steamship lines had begun to penetrate the country, 
carrying the foreigner’s goods to the farthest border, 
it was admitted that a new type of mind was needed 
to cope with this aggressive invader. 

Out of this discovery came the schools based on 
Western models; the flight of students overseas - y 
the new system of national education. There were 
times, as in the bloody summer of 1900, when the 
Boxer madness was upon the land, when the Chinese 
were ready to curse the Westerner and all his works. 
And there were other times when they saw in this 
new type of education the way to a China that should 
surpass in glory even the empire of the past. 

The political revolution of 1911 really ushered 
in another period when the scholar lost his suprem¬ 
acy. To be sure, it was the new ideas that brought 
about that overturning of the Manchu throne. But 
[25] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


when the struggle was won, and the country turned 
to the constructive work of building the republic 
that had been proclaimed, the Chinese largely forgot 
the student and relied upon the soldier. 

Perhaps we should not blame China too much for 
this choice. Her contact with the West had shown 
her the way in which military power is able to exact 
its wishes. Just across the Yellow Sea she had 
watched an island neighbor climb from obscurity to 
a place among the world powers on the foundation 
of a first-class army and navy. And all the rush 
and roar of this intensely competitive life into which 
she had been, willy-nilly, dragged seemed to call for 
the “iron-and-blood heart and spirit” more than the 
scholar’s contemplation. 

In the place of the deposed boy emperor China 
put a typical “strong man,” Yuan Shih-kai. He had 
achieved power as the builder of the first Chinese 
army according to Western models. From the ranks 
of his soldiers he largely drew his subordinates, and 
when Yuan died, these militaristic pupils of his con¬ 
tinued in command of armies scattered throughout 
every one of China’s eighteen provinces. 

We have no space here for a discussion of the part 
that these tuchuns , or military governors, have 
played in the recent history of China. Theirs have 
been the names filling the newspapers. For the 
most part, they have been ignorant, brutal, selfish 
men, conducting their armies as their own private 
freebooting bands, and “living off the land” in a 
[ 26 ] 


SAVED BY, ITS STUDENTS 

way that has made millions of Chinese curse the 
very name of soldier. When one of these generals 
has accumulated too much power, others have com¬ 
bined to pull him down. These battles have added 
spice to every recent summer. And because they 
have been interested only in the lining of their own 
purses and the exercise of their own despotic powers, 
these tuchuns have made anything like decent or 
democratic government a myth throughout the land. 
This has been true in every part of the country save 
the one or two provinces that have practically as¬ 
serted their autonomy and have set up local and 
almost independent administrations. 

Under the rule of the military men the disintegra¬ 
tion of China has proceeded with alarming rapidity. 
And why not? Suppose you are offered a post in 
the government. Because it is you, let us suppose 
it to be a high post, such as a membership in a 
cabinet. Suppose you become minister of communi¬ 
cations, with the development of all the natural 
resources—the mines, the forests, the water-power— 
and the building of all the railways under your con¬ 
trol. Could you want a better opportunity to serve 
your country? 

But you go to the capital. You find no money 
with which to run your department. Your salary 
will not pay your living expenses, for there are 
hordes of people, in your family and in your min¬ 
istry, dependent upon you. Nobody in the cabinet 
dares make a move contrary to the wishes of the 
[ 27 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


particular militarist whose army at the moment con¬ 
trols the city. And that individual is engaged with 
but one interest. In language that has been heard 
in other lands, he is “getting his while the getting 
is good.” 

One day the general sends for you. There is a 
foreign concession hunter who wants the control of 
a certain mine. Will you kindly sign the necessary 
papers? There will be a large portion of “graft” 
in it for you if you do. What if the price is ridicu¬ 
lously low? What if it is the general who will 
profit, and not the people? If you don’t sign, you 
will be punished. Why not take your share of the 
universal graft? 

To the honor of many a Chinese be it said that, 
confronted by such conditions, scores of them have 
resigned rather than continue in office. But, up to 
that summer of 1919 with which our story started, 
this had not seriously hampered the militarists. 
Other men were put in their places who were willing 
to sign anything for sufficient compensation. By the 
summer of 1919 it was reported that seventy-four 
per cent of all the mines in China, both developed 
and undeveloped, which should have brought wealth 
to China’s own people for centuries, had been mort¬ 
gaged to foreign concerns for preposterously inade¬ 
quate sums. And no one could tell into whose 
pockets the money had gone. 

It was a dismal enough outcome to less than a 
decade of rule by the militarist. The attempt to 
[ 28 ] 


SAVED BY ITS STUDENTS 


reverse the natural Chinese social order, a procedure 
said by many Westerners to hold out the only hope 
for a strong state, had brought nothing but disaster. 

Perhaps we should not blame the militarist and 
his tools too heavily. Perhaps we should see that 
if he was willing to squander the national birthright, 
there were others who were eager to have him do so. 
In the West, during the years when China was first 
being opened to Occidental influences, there grew 
up the theory that governments should support their 
citizens in whatever commercial adventures they be¬ 
came engaged in foreign lands, without much re¬ 
gard to the feeling of the peoples of those lands. 
And so it has been that when a Western syndicate 
has been able to show a paper assigning to it the 
power to take the natural wealth of some part of 
China, even though that paper might be signed by 
a man who never held any real authority, and had 
been repudiated the week after he signed, Western 
governments have had a way of saying, “This con¬ 
stitutes a valid claim upon the part of our nationals, 
and we will back up that claim with all our forces.” 
Western governmental support for cheap commercial 
intrigue of that sort has a lot to do with the present 
difficulties of China. 

And then there has been the influence of Japan. 
This has to be taken into consideration, for if you 
ask Chinese what the cause of their country’s present 
trouble is, a great majority of them will say, “Japan.” 
The simple fact is that Japan sees that the basis of 
[29] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


modern industry is iron and coal, and perhaps in the 
future oil. Having little of any of these indispensa- 
bles, Japan has gone about trying to obtain them. 
Seeing them in abundance in the land of her neigh¬ 
bor on the Asiatic mainland, and fearing lest they 
might fall into other hands, she tried, for a while, 
to possess them by the most obvious course—diplo¬ 
matic pressure, backed by military threats. But what 
happened in the summer of 1919, and what has hap¬ 
pened since, has done much to convince Japan that 
there are better ways of securing raw materials. The 
power of the militarist is passing in Japan, just as it 
is bound to pass in China. The two countries will 
one day work out a commercial understanding upon 
a basis that will be beneficial to both of them. 

But we must not get away from the early summer 
of 1919. Here is China, with the scholar eight years 
or more in the discard, and nothing to show for 
it but a land looted and reduced to the verge of 
anarchy. Over in Paris there is in session an inter¬ 
national conference to establish world peace. China 
has gone to that conference seeking redress for all 
sorts of wrongs at the hands of the other nations. 
The memorandum presented by her delegates has 
been pronounced one of the most remarkable and 
irrefutable pleas for international justice ever drawn 
up. And it has come to pass that the issue has be¬ 
come symbolized in the fate of the former German 
territory of Kiaochow, with the railway and mines 
[ 30 ] 


SAVED BY ITS STUDENTS 

that stretch back from it across the province of 
Shantung. 

To the Chinese the Shantung question seemed 
simple enough. The territory had been leased to 
Germany in the first place under military pressure. 
Japan had declared, at the outbreak of the war, that 
she would regain it for its rightful owners. But, 
once in, she showed slight intention of leaving, and 
had even greatly increased her holdings beyond those 
that the Germans had occupied. China had finally 
entered the war upon the same side as Japan. Surely, 
justice demanded that she receive back her own. 

The Peace Conference decided otherwise. It was 
the third day of May, 1919, when the news reached 
China. Ihe next day the Student Strike was afoot. 
It turned against the men who had been conspicuous 
in the sale of natural rights to Japanese, and against 
the Japanese themselves. The shopkeepers were in¬ 
duced to join forces with the students, and business 
came to a standstill. Within forty days, as we have 
seen, the first part of the student program had been 
achieved. The government that included the offi¬ 
cials the students called traitors had fallen. 

It took longer to carry the second phase of this 
program into effect. But the results were even more 
far-reaching. All over the country merchants and 
people were induced to undertake a boycott of Japa¬ 
nese-manufactured goods, just then flooding the 
markets from which the World War had kept the 
[ 31 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

products of other nations. At first the boycott was 
not taken very seriously by those against whom it was 
leveled. Soon, however, a newspaper in Peking, 
friendly to the Japanese, was writing, “We must 
confess at this writing that there seems to be some¬ 
thing different in the movement which has grown 
out of popular resentment and despair since the re¬ 
ceipt of the verdict from Paris. It appears to be 
more intelligent, less emotional, better organized, 
less furious, and, in the first instance, a clearer 
understanding of causes and a more thorough 
knowledge of the events which have led up to the 
calamity.” 

Soon Japanese steamers on the Yangtze were run¬ 
ning without cargoes. Japanese shops in every port 
were going out of business. In some of the cities, 
ricksha-pullers would refuse to deposit their pas¬ 
sengers before a Japanese place of business. Japa¬ 
nese business fell and fell until it seemed that all 
the advantage that the war years had brought, when 
there had been almost no other competitors, would 
be lost. Day after day a newspaper in Shanghai car¬ 
ried across the top of its first page a statement cred¬ 
ited to President Wilson: “A nation boycotted is a 
nation defeated.” 

Of course, a thing like that could not go on in¬ 
definitely. Nor could the student strike maintain it¬ 
self long as a worthy political method. In the course 
of time Japanese goods began to creep back into cir¬ 
culation, and later attempts of the students to dictate 
[ 32 ] 


SAVED BYj ITS STUDENTS 

to the government by leaving classes, because they 
had no real popular support, proved a failure. In¬ 
deed, it was not long before the student leaders saw 
the dangers of the strike and turned to other meth¬ 
ods. It was too easy to defeat the ends for which 
the students were in school by leaving classes when¬ 
ever the authorities did something displeasing. In 
truth, there were well-grounded suspicions that cer¬ 
tain strikes had been deliberately provoked by the 
militarists in order to give an excuse for the closing 
of schools that were turning out troublesome 
graduates. 

But the contribution of the Student Movement 
through that first strike and the subsequent boycott 
must not be minimized. There were at least three 
things that it accomplished of far-reaching impor¬ 
tance. 

For one thing, it stopped the national looting. 
The years 1916, 1917, 1918, and the first months 
of 1919, had scarcely seen a month pass without 
witnessing the signing away of some natural resource 
that should have meant wealth for China’s own sons 
and daughters. But the outburst of national rage 
engineered by the students had such a salutary effect 
that there have been almost no such barters since 
that date. The strike at least held what was left 
for China’s own possession. 

Again, the Student Movement focused public at¬ 
tention on national affairs. It used to be said that, 
in huge China, with ninety-five per cent of her four 
[33] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


hundred million people illiterate, you could not have 
a public opinion. The students proved that you can. 
If you go far down in the interior of some of the 
provinces that lie off the beaten tourist track, you 
will find painted on city walls the exhortation, “Do 
not forget the Day of Humiliation.” The same 
words are frequently pressed on cakes, where we 
would expect to see “Nabisco.” And the Day of 
Humiliation thus held in mind is the one that com¬ 
memorates the forced acceptance of the Japanese 
Twenty-One Demands of 1915. 

“It was late in the fall of 1919,” says Stanley 
High. “Our party was traveling by coolie caravan 
across the Chinese province of Kiangsi toward the 
upper Min River in western Fukien. Finding my¬ 
self at a river crossing, piled on a ferry with a crowd 
of chair-bearers, I suggested to a Chinese friend that 
he ask one of them what he thought of Japan. He 
did, and, to our amazement, the coolie addressed 
broke out—as coolies can—into the most violent 
harangue, at the climax of which he pulled from his 
tunic a flaring poster depicting Japan as a well-fed 
thief scurrying away with the rice of starving 
China.” 1 

Things like this you stumble on far from any 
schools. Their implications can cause you to lose 
some sleep, for it is no small thing to have such a 
relentless resentment fostered in the heart of Asia. 
But they certainly show the success which the Stu- 
1 The Revolt of Youth, by Stanley High, Abingdon Press. 

[34] 


SAVED BY ITS STUDENTS 

dent Movement has had in arousing public interest 
in national affairs. 

Finally, the Movement, as we have already said, 
brought the student back to his old position of lead¬ 
ership. He has not maintained it since that summer 
of 1919, at least, in a political way. He has been 
willing to forgo it for the moment if he may attain 
it more securely later on. But he then, for the mo¬ 
ment, reasserted his place, and showed that, in the 
forces that will finally mold the new China, he is 
not to be despised. As a symbol, as well as a con¬ 
crete achievement, the Student Movement of the 
summer of 1919 deserves attention. 

There are dolorous prophets who say that China 
is going to pieces. They talk of bandits and tuchuns 
(it is hard to distinguish between them at times) and 
grafting officials and other marks of a disordered 
state, and they say that the end is at hand. Perhaps 
it is, although history tells of other periods when 
China has been even more disorderly, only to re¬ 
cover her stability and power. But if these proph¬ 
ecies are not fulfilled, and if China does in some 
way manage to weather the storms that now beset 
her, she can look back to what happened in 1919, 
and since then, and thank her students for her sal¬ 
vation. 

Without the students, the nation never would have 
rallied to its own protection. Without the students, 
a public understanding of the issues at stake would 
never have been possible. Without the students, the 
[35] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


little band of diplomats who cried for justice at the 
bar of the world’s opinion would have been left un¬ 
supported. China, in these days of her need, has 
once more been saved by the men whom she has 
been wise enough to see are a nation’s greatest 
strength. 

It is not sufficient, however, to say that China has 
been saved by her students, and let it go at that. 
We must remember that it is a new type of scholar 
who has done the saving. It is no more the book¬ 
worm, the dreamy contemplator of past splendors. 
It is not the man who came out of the examination 
stall; it is the man who comes out of the laboratory 
and the modern classroom. Yes, and the woman; 
for the girls from their colleges and high schools 
have borne a full share in this work of national 
rescue. 

The successful assertion of student leadership at 
the critical moment in 1919 was the great justifica¬ 
tion, in the Chinese patriot’s eyes, of the new type 
of learning that has supplanted the old. And if 
anyone doubts that the Chinese now see in this sort 
of education what they need for the accommodation 
of their nation to the demands of a new day, let 
him ponder the growth of the student body in gov¬ 
ernment schools conducted on the new model from 
1,625,534 in 1910 to 4,500,000 in 1919. Add the 
half million students in mission schools, and you 
have five million Chinese receiving modern educa¬ 
tion! In less than ten years, filled with disorders 
[36] 


SAVED BY ITS STUDENTS 


that would have seemed to make progress impos¬ 
sible, with hardly any money left available by the 
militarists, the number of Chinese receiving educa¬ 
tion grew from one in four hundred to one in eighty! 

Christians can read those figures, showing as they 
do the growing confidence in the new type of school 
and the new type of scholar, with a glow of satis¬ 
faction. For it was the Christian missionary who 
brought that kind of school to China! “Long be¬ 
fore Chinese intellectuals themselves ever influenced 
their countrymen, the missionaries had prepared the 
ground for them,” Dr. Min-chien T. Z. Tyau has 
written. There are many missionaries still at work 
in China who can tell of the days when parents had 
to be paid in order that a handful of cowering, 
frightened youngsters might be gathered within the 
sort of schools that had been brought from the West! 
And today when a thinking Chinese points to a 
modern school and says, “That is the place from 
which will come China’s saviors,” the Christian who 
has had something to do with first sending that type 
of education across the Pacific will see more clearly 
what his gift, directly and indirectly, has meant. 


[ 37 ] 


Ill 

A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 


Where were you in the spring of 1916? Were 
you, by any chance, in New York City? Suppose 
you had been and suppose some friend had said, 
“I have tickets for the Columbia commencement. 
Come on, let’s go.” Then, as the diplomas were 
distributed, and a slight young Chinese stepped from 
a group of his fellow-countrymen to be made a doc¬ 
tor of philosophy, suppose that friend had said, 
“That young man will influence more lives than any 
other person now living.” Would you not have 
been sure that your friend was slightly crazy? 

So far as I know, nobody made that prophecy 
at the Columbia commencement in 1916. That 
young Chinese had crossed two American campuses 
daily for months without being much distinguished 
from the other Chinese who were his fellow-stu¬ 
dents. And today it will seem to some absurd to 
say that a young man but thirty-two years of age is, 
or is becoming, the most influential man of our times. 
Yet, with the possible exception of Mr. Gandhi in 
India, I think this true. If he lives as long as Mr. 
Ghandi has, and if his influence keeps expanding in 
the same degree that it already has, when he dies, 
Hu Suh will have affected more lives than any other 
man in this generation. 

Should you pick up a copy of Who y s Who in 
[38] 



© Y.IV.C.A. Photo Service 


POPULAR EDUCATION IS MAKING RAPID STRIDES IN SUCH SCHOOLS 
AS THIS, CONDUCTED BY THE Y.W.C.A., WHERE A SIMPLI¬ 
FIED FORM OF WRITING IS BEING TAUGHT 


wm 











MAGAZINES SYMBOLIC OF CHINA S REAL REVOLUTION 






















A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 


China , you would not be likely to pay much atten¬ 
tion to the note about Hu Suh. Born in 1892 $ edu¬ 
cated in China and America 3 a professor in the 
National University at Peking since 1916; editor 
of a magazine, La Jeunesse; contributor to many 
other periodicals j author of various books, including 
a History of Chinese Philosophy; member of sev¬ 
eral educational commissions. That doesn’t sound 
much like the biography of one of the world’s most 
influential men, does it? Nor, but for one fact that 
lies concealed behind those listed, is it. For Hu 
Suh is not only a professor of literature in a Chinese 
university j he is the father of the Chinese Literary 
Revolution. 

When you begin to talk about a Literary Revolu¬ 
tion in China, you are swinging clear out of the realm 
of ideas in which we generally think of the changes 
that are taking place in that land. Even when we 
do not think of soldiers and battles and political 
intrigue, we are likely to think of student mass- 
meetings and boycotts and soap-box orators. That 
is to be expected, for, as we said in the previous chap¬ 
ter, it has been that kind of a Student Movement 
that has saved China from utter disintegration, and 
has been, in some part, reported in the press of the 
world. 

The political events of the past few years have 
been a part of China’s revolution. But they have 
been only a part, and not the most important part, 
at that. The contribution of the students and the 
[39] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

educated classes has, to some extent, been made in 
the political realm. But only to a slight extent. 
For thinking Chinese have come to see that political 
change will not be sufficient to make China the land 
she should be. And the truth is that the students 
and their leaders have become so sensitive to the 
shortcomings of political action that they have al¬ 
most entirely abandoned that form of activity. 

We have seen some of the weaknesses of the po¬ 
litical agitation of the students 3 how it took them 
from the classes in which they were supposed to be 
learning the things that the country would one day 
need. Sometimes “direct action” of this kind led, 
under the excitement of the mob spirit, to excesses 
that were later bitterly regretted. And always there 
was the deeper shortcoming that the thoughtful 
student leader could not overlook, the ignorance of 
the people, which bound them to habits of thought 
that made true progress almost impossible. 

There was something superb in the courage of the 
idealists who launched the Chinese Republic in 1911. 
When Sun Yat-sen and Tang Shao-yi and Li Yuan- 
hung (all men who had spent student days outside 
China) started that great adventure, by which China 
offered herself to light the torch of democracy in 
the midst of the immemorial darkness of Asiatic 
autocracy, all the Western world thrilled. How 
incredible it seemed on that day when we opened 
our newspapers to learn that the Peacock Throne and 
the Dragon Flag had been banished forever! 

[40] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 

But it takes more than the vision and courage of 
a few leaders to make a democracy successful. No 
matter what other circumstances there may be, the 
power of a people’s government depends upon the 
ability of the people to know what the questions 
are that face their country and to decide those ques¬ 
tions with a fair degree of understanding. That is 
why, to many Americans, the “little red schoolhouse” 
has come to be the symbol of their country’s great¬ 
ness, and likewise why some other democratic ven¬ 
tures, in countries with high rates of illiteracy, have 
not been notably successful. 

Think what that meant in China! Here were 
four hundred million people, only five per cent of 
whom could read and write. Here learning was a 
hidden thing, requiring at least a score of years 
for its discovering. Here was hardly the haziest 
notion on the part of the masses of the nature of 
the world in which their new government must take 
its place. Here were the long-lingering effects of 
a Great Wall, beyond which new ideas had been 
kept at bay, and within which old ideas had been 
preserved long after they should have been dis¬ 
carded. Just a little consideration of such a situa¬ 
tion as that will show that, to attempt to establish 
a democracy on such a foundation, far from guaran¬ 
teeing benefit, might lead directly to most awful 
abuses. In fact, the history of the past ten years 
in China shows plenty of such abuses. If they are 
to grow less in the future, it will be because the 
[41] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


character of the public mind has begun to change. 

That is what the Republic requires if it is to have 
any chance for permanency in China—changed 
minds. John Dewey, one of America’s clearest 
thinkers, saw that after he had been in China just 
a little while. “The real problem of the Pacific,” 
he wrote to men who were grandiosely talking of 
that problem in political terms, “the real problem 
of the Pacific is the problem of the transformation 
of the mind of China, of the capacity of the oldest 
and most complicated civilization of the globe to re¬ 
make itself into the new forms required by the im¬ 
pact of immense alien forces.” 

China’s student leaders saw this long before Dr. 
Dewey gave it expression. As far back as 1898 a 
famous viceroy, Chang Chih-tung, published a book 
that has been translated as China’s Only Hope y 
in which he pleaded for national education. The 
book had an enormous circulation, and was publicly 
commended by the emperor. Hardly had the Stu¬ 
dent Movement of 1919 burst out when thinkers 
began to call for something more fundamental. 
“We must change people’s minds,” they said. “It 
is not enough to punish our unworthy politicians. 
We must dig to the very roots of our civilization 
and transform the forces that make for social stag¬ 
nation.” 

But how are you to change the minds of people 
who cannot read? China had the highest rate of 
illiteracy of any civilized country. But five per 
[42] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 


cent of her population could understand the wen-li, 
as the literary style of writing is known. And when 
you discovered the intricacies of that form of writing, 
involving at least twenty years of unremitting study 
for its mastery, you wondered, not that there were 
so few who could read it, but that twenty million 
could! Think of trying to re-make the mind of a 
quarter of the human race with an instrument as 
dismayingly ineffective as wen-li! 

Did you ever notice the way in which Mr. H. G. 
Wells ran on to this disturbing fact? Turn to one 
of the most engaging parts of his Outline of His¬ 
tory. Here he comes, tripping down the centuries, 
cracking a head here and a tradition there, stopping 
from time to time to fish a moral from the various 
sloughs of despond into which we have flung our¬ 
selves, but always managing to keep faith in the 
future alive, to keep marching toward a millennium, 
and almost reaching it when he runs, slap!—into 
the Chinese language. It is a jarring experience 
for Mr. Wells, and he shows it by devoting more 
space to it than he does to the American Civil War. 
Nor can you blame him. For Mr. Wells is entirely 
right. As long as the Chinese written language re¬ 
mained what it was when Mr. Wells was writing, 
it stood as an impenetrable barrier between a quarter 
of the race and an understanding of their age. And 
while that condition continued, as it had for thou¬ 
sands of years, any hope for Mr. Wells’s millennium 
was vain. 


[ 43 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


What sort of a language is this wen-li? Thou¬ 
sands of years ago it began as the ordinary language 
of speech as well as of writing. But, as the centuries 
passed, it was refined and refined by the sages in 
their writing. Confucius, who lived five hundred 
years before Christ, found it a perfected vehicle 
for his books. It has no alphabet, of course. The 
Chinese use ideographs (picture symbols) rather 
than the arbitrary a b c with which we are familiar. 
But even the ideographs, known as characters, were 
no longer used in their primary meaning. A char¬ 
acter became attached in thought to some famous 
idea in which it had been used by some sage, until 
the point has been reached whereby one character 
stands for a half dozen or more words. Reading, 
therefore, becomes the art of remembering number¬ 
less literary allusions, to which characters, often with 
little reference to their primary meaning, give the 
clue. 

It is simply impossible to give a satisfactory illus¬ 
tration in English of the way in which wen-li is 
written. We have, in the West, no literature, even 
including that of ancient Egypt, comparable to it. 
But suppose Shakespeare had written twenty-five 
hundred years ago. And suppose his line, “The 
quality of mercy is not strained,” had made a deep 
impression as a perfect expression of one literary 
idea. Suppose others, coming after, had wanted to 
reproduce it, but without writing it in full. Suppose 
they had just written “quality,” without reference 
[44] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 


to whether it meant quality in persons or in goods. 
Then suppose the same process had been repeated 
with the next line, the key-word this time being 
“dew” which would be indistinguishable from “do” 
or “due.” And suppose now that when you came 
to pick up a paper and saw there two characters, 
“quality” and “dew,” you were expected immedi¬ 
ately to think of some such lofty expression as, “The 
exercise of mercy is one of the most worthy acts 
that heaven has ever inspired in the hearts of men.” 
There you would have, if you can think of such 
an unthinkable way of writing as that, some faint 
approximation of the sort of a written language 
wen-li is. 

You don’t wonder that not many Chinese can read 
wen-li , do you? More than a hundred years before 
Christ, petitions addressed to the throne stated that 
the wen-li had become unintelligible to the majority 
of the public officials. Indeed, it was the discovery 
that his officers could not read his mandates that 
made the emperor install the system of literary ex¬ 
aminations, insuring that the public officials should 
be chosen from men who could. 

The spoken language of most of China, however, 
is no such bugaboo. In fact, it is one of the simplest 
languages used by any civilized people. Without 
declensions or conjugations, it might almost be said 
to be without grammar. Yet it is pungent and pithy, 
and capable of infinite variations and shadings. In 
parts of South China it has, in the course of the cen- 
[45] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


tunes, with the absence of easy intercommunication, 
become radically different from the spoken language 
of North and Central China. But, roughly speak¬ 
ing, there may be said to be at least three hundred 
million Chinese using some form of what is known 
as the Mandarin, or kuan-hwa dialect. 

The relation between the written wen-li and the 
spoken Mandarin ( kuan-hwa ) has been compared 
to that which existed in Europe in medieval times 
between Latin and the vulgar tongues. The com¬ 
parison is not a bad one. For just as in medieval 
Europe there existed one language for literature 
and the talk of scholars and courts, with other lan¬ 
guages for the speech of the common people that 
might have grown out of the Latin but were no 
longer recognizable as its offspring, so in China the 
wen-ll and the kuan-hwa have lived beside each 
other. And just as in Europe Dante and Chaucer 
and Luther and others had to begin to write a liter¬ 
ature in Italian and English and German before 
there could come the great awakening of the Renais¬ 
sance and the Reformation, so in China men had to 
begin to read and write as they spoke before any 
popular mental awakening could be possible. 

Centuries ago some Chinese perceived this, and 
started to write in the vernacular. Not with any 
strange symbols, be it understood. The same his¬ 
toric characters were employed, but in their every¬ 
day significance. And a character meant what it 
plainly said, “only that and nothing more.” Yet 
[46] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 

these attempts had only a restricted success. Certain 
novels written in the kuan-hwa achieved a wide 
reading, and the later experiments of Christian mis¬ 
sionaries with a Mandarin version of the Bible gave 
the gospel to large numbers who could never have 
read it in the wen-U. Such departures from prece¬ 
dent awoke the derision of all the literati . 

“What! do you call that real Chinese literature?” 
they would scoff, pointing at one of the offending 
novels. “That’s not literature 5 that’s just trash, just 
words strung together to while away time for a tea¬ 
room lounger.” 

And when the Mandarin Bible was mentioned, 
their scorn was even more blighting. 

“That a Chinese book? That’s not a book; that’s 
just another sample of the foreigner’s barbarism. 
Think of saying that the maxims contained in any 
such hodge-podge of style as that are to be compared 
with the words of our sages! Why, any farmer 
could understand that!” 

And then Dr. Hu Suh, whom we have almost 
forgotten since we saw him receiving his diploma in 
the first paragraph of this chapter, appeared on the 
scene. As a professor in the National University 
at Peking, Dr. Hu found himself a member of a 
group of professors noted for their independence, 
their keenness of mind, and their patriotism. Soon 
he found the whole faculty in agreement that no 
Student Movement nor other such political activity 
could avail for the salvation of China until some 
[47] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

way were found of reaching and changing the minds 
of China’s common people. And when he suggested 
that the attempt be made to reach that mind by 
writing in a way more understandable than the 
wen-liy Dr. Hu discovered his colleagues ready to 
support him. 

This university group had been publishing a little 
monthly magazine known as Youth , or ha Jeu- 
nesse . This magazine Dr. Hu used as the weapon 
for his attack on the ancient form of writing. He 
published an article entitled “Suggestions for the 
Reform of Chinese Literature,” in which he made 
the proposal that, in order to make knowledge dem¬ 
ocratic, Chinese should be written as the best kuan- 
hwa is spoken. 

“If we truly wish to give China a literature which 
shall not only be expressive of the real life and 
thoughts of our own time, but also an effective force 
in intellectual and social reforms,” Dr. Hu wrote, 
“we must first emancipate ourselves from the fetters 
of a dead language which may once have been the 
literary instrument for our forefathers, but which 
certainly is not adequate for the creation of a living 
literature of our times. It is to free ourselves from 
these shackles that we are now proposing the adop¬ 
tion of spoken Chinese as our literary medium.” 

To the new style of writing was generally given 
the name of fel-hway or “white language,” which is 
an expressive Chinese idiom meaning “plain lan¬ 
guage.” The “white” hints at the whiteness of sun- 
[48] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 

light, in the full glare of which nothing can be 
hidden. It is a sort of Oriental way of suggesting 
what we Westerners would call “language that can 
be seen through,” although the Oriental idiom seems 
even more vigorous and suggestive. 

When first the / pei-hwa appeared, it was greeted 
with a howl of derision. What sort of an assump¬ 
tion of learning was this? But derision did not stop 
Dr. Hu and his friends. They went ahead, writing 
all sorts of things in the new form. They trans¬ 
lated articles from Western periodicals dealing with 
matters of immense moment ; they recounted bits 
of Chinese history; they even dared attempt poetry! 
And other publications began to appear in other stu¬ 
dent centers, written in the same novel style. 

From derision, the old-time scholars passed to the 
most violent opposition. Use of the fei-hwa was 
denounced as treason to the most sacred traditions 
of China’s history. Confucius, Mencius, and all the 
other makers of China’s civilization had written 
wen-li; who were these who would displace it? Cer¬ 
tainly they could not be one hundred per cent 
Chinese! 

So the struggle went on, at the same time that the 
political activities of the students were attracting so 
much attention. Finally, Dr. Hu brought it to a 
focus in a typically Chinese fashion. 

There is probably no more rational being than the 
Chinese. He is not like the traditional Scotchman, 
who is reputed to have said that he was open to con- 
[ 49 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


viction, but that he would like to meet the man who 
could convince him! The Chinese is generally open 
to conviction, and it requires only a demonstration 
that appeals to his innate reasoning powers to con¬ 
vince him. He can be more easily reached by a 
logical statement than most men. To a large extent 
this is a part of the magnificent heritage left him 
by Confucius. 

Dr. Hu felt that a rational demonstration of the 
capability of the pei-hwa to express any sort of 
thought would decide the battle between the old and 
new forms of writing. So he set himself the most 
exacting literary task that he could conceive. He 
wrote, and a progressive Chinese firm published, a 
two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy. It 
was in the new form, and the reading public, after 
admitting its excellency, also had to admit that if 
the pei-hwa could successfully express all the niceties 
of thought that had marked all the sages of all the 
ages, it could express anything. The book became, 
and has remained, a best seller. And with its accept¬ 
ance, the battle for the pei-hwa was won. 

All over China magazines in the new form began 
to pour from the presses. Wherever two or three 
students were gathered together, there they gener¬ 
ally founded a new paper. Many of these died with 
a few issues, but others prospered. The newspapers 
almost universally abandoned the wen-li y and the 
majority of the books appeared in the pei-hwa . The 
circulation of all papers went up, for the simpler 
[50] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 

form made it possible for thousands to read who 
had been debarred by the old classical style. Thou¬ 
sands of Chinese knew enough characters to read 
ordinary news, provided that news was written in 
the style where a character meant what it did when 
used in speech. At a conservative estimate, the in¬ 
troduction of the pei-hwa must have more than 
doubled the Chinese reading public since the close 
of the World War. Some would say that it has 
been tripled. And the rate of increase continues, 
for it is now possible, by using this new form, to give 
a child the rudiments of an education—the readin’ 
and Titin’, if not the ’rithmetic—in three or four 
years of school. It is easily conceivable that, within 
fifty years, if there is a fair degree of public order, 
China can have a citizenship at least as literate as 
that of many of the countries 'of Europe. And it 
is the thought of this great horde to whom the hori¬ 
zons of knowledge have been thus suddenly broad¬ 
ened that makes us say, as we did at the beginning, 
that the unassuming little professor who was a stu¬ 
dent in our American colleges only a few years ago 
may ultimately influence more lives than any other 
person now living. 

To us, interested as we are in the fate of Chris¬ 
tianity in China, there is an especial import in this 
victory for the pei-hwa. For since those pioneer 
days when the Bible, despite the jeers of the literati , 
was translated into the vernacular, the Christian 
writer in China has experimented in writing in this 

[ 51 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


form. Now the despised vernacular becomes the 
literary fashion, and millions of new hands are 
stretching out for reading matter. It is the day of 
all days for the printing-press in China. If the 
Christian forces are wise enough to enlist such of 
their young Chinese leaders as are capable in the 
production of literature in this new form, the prog¬ 
ress of the Christian message should take on un¬ 
exampled speed. 

Of course, this fundamental problem of trans¬ 
forming the mind of China is not solved when you 
work out a system of writing that the masses can 
understand. If you have not something worth say¬ 
ing, to what profit is all the turmoil? 

Many of us have gasped in admiration in recent 
months as we have watched a tiny aeroplane scud 
across the sky and write letters a half mile high 
upon the heavens. But I think that most of us, as 
we have seen those letters form into nothing more 
than the name of a cheap cigarette, have felt that 
we were watching a gigantic display of misdirected 
energy. John Ruskin told England when the first 
cable was laid to India, “You have only wasted an 
all-around-the-world’s length of copper wire. . . . 
If you had had, perchance, two words of common 
sense to say, though you had taken wearisome time 
and trouble to send them, the two words of common 
sense would have been worth the carriage, and 
more.” 

The reformers who have sponsored the pei-hwa 

[ 52 ] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 

in China have seen and escaped this danger. From 
the first they have relied principally upon the con¬ 
tent of their message to carry its form. They have 
dealt with the most searching problems in Chinese 
life; they have translated the latest thinking of the 
outstanding minds of the West. There has never 
been a time when the news-stands that bore pel-hwa 
literature did not, by that fact, guarantee that they 
were selling the most up-to-date, thoughtful, and 
helpful writing in China. 

As an example of the scope of interest on the part 
of these pioneers, take the table of contents of a 
single issue of three different magazines. These are 
just ordinary issues, such as might be found at any 
time in any one of the student centers of China. 
They have been largely written by the faculties and 
students of certain government schools. Compare 
them with the papers that Western students publish. 

The Renaissance 

The Christ Before Jesus 

The Foundations of Anarchy, and the Society of Anarchy 

Opposed to the Life of Individualism 

The Field of Psychology 

Industry in Relation to Livelihood 

Woman’s Rights and the Law 

The Present-day Power of Democracy 

The Building of Public Opinion 

The Methods of Sociology 

[ 53 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 
La Jeunesse 

Pragmatism 

The Foundations of Russian Revolutionary Philosophy 
Work in Relation to Life 

Discussing the Foundations of Electoral Franchise 
Revolution in Thought 

Men’s and Women’s Social Relations Should Be Free 


Emancipation and Reconstruction 

Leadership, Competition, and the Labor Movement 
Labor Unions 
A Criticism of Socialism 

Biological Egoism, Altruism, and Universal Love 
The Education of Commercial Apprentices 
The Logical Leadership of the Labor Movement 
Lenin and Trotsky—The Men and Their Ideas 
The Definition of Socialism 


Do you notice how many times the word “founda¬ 
tions” appears in that short list of articles? In a 
way that symbolizes the mental revolution in China, 
of which the work of Dr. Hu Suh is a part. For the 
enthusiasm and the devotion by which, in the face 
of the most vituperative opposition, Dr. Hu and his 
followers changed in five years the cultural outlook 
of millions of Chinese can only be explained as we 
see this so-called Literary Revolution as a founda¬ 
tion for something larger. 

This larger movement is an intellectual upheaval 
to which the Chinese have given the suggestive name 
[ 54 ] 



PASTOR TING LI-MEI, ONE OF THE LEADERS IN BUILDING THE CHRIS¬ 
TIANITY OF CHINA’S FUTURE, WHICH WILL BE A CHINESE 
CHRISTIANITY EXPRESSED BY CHINESE MINDS. 





A CHARACTERISTIC TOWN CHURCH IN NORTH CHINA AND SOME OF ITS SCHOOLBOYS 




A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 


of the New Tide of Thought. Sometimes it is 
spoken of as the New Civilization Movement j some¬ 
times as the New Thought Movement; sometimes as 
the Renaissance. But the first name seems most 
graphically to characterize it. It is the sweeping 
in of a great new tide of thinking, calculated to wash 
away all the superstitions and wrong ideas that have 
hampered progress in the past, and to leave only 
the social customs and beliefs that can stand firm 
even when deep waters swirl about them. 

In the long run, as China’s clearest thinking pa¬ 
triots see, the stability of the Republic will depend 
upon a society that is not only literate, but in har¬ 
mony with all modern wisdom. This has impelled 
student leaders, and other like-minded Chinese, to 
begin to study most relentlessly all the social cus¬ 
toms, educational methods, and popular beliefs, in 
order to find out what are and what are not worthy 
to survive in this new day. 

“The Movement,” said a book written by some of 
its leaders recently, “has put up as its platform four 
big tasks 5 namely, the reorganization, the re-state¬ 
ment, and the re-evaluation of Chinese civilization 
with critical examination of it 5 a thorough and scien¬ 
tific study of theories and facts j a reconstruction of 
individual and social life.” 1 

No crusader ever set out to win the Holy City 
with any deeper sense of consecration to a great 

1 China Today Through Chinese Eyes . By four Chinese, of 
whom Dr. Hu Suh is one. George H. Doran Co., New York. 

[ 55 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


spiritual task than these young Chinese have felt 
as they have undertaken this adventure. When we 
consider how any achievement of its purposes would 
alter some of the very bases of the life of four 
hundred million people, we are the more amazed 
at their courage. And, of course, it will be a long 
time before their goals are fully attained. Yet it 
is marvelous what they have already accomplished. 
Largely, this is because of the methods that they 
have adopted. 

“Science as a method,” says one of the Christian 
leaders of the movement, “is strongly advocated and 
persistently followed. . . . Nothing is to be ac¬ 
cepted unless it can stand the tests of the scientific 
method. , . . The movement has been a relentless 
foe to despotic government and autocratic institutions 
of every sort. . . . The movement lays the empha¬ 
sis upon relentless thoroughness. The movement 
has thus far proved to be one which has unusual 
courage and persistency. No obstacle is too great to 
overcome, and no compromise is small enough to be 
tolerated. . . . There is nothing too radical for ex¬ 
amination. Convention and traditions have lost their 
prestige. Time-honored practices, if in any way 
they do not meet the exigencies of the present day, 
are to be cast aside, root and branch, altogether. 
Proprieties and customs which have ruled for centu¬ 
ries give way unless they can withstand the challenge 
that is being put to them.” 1 

1 Ibid. 


[ 56 ] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 


So it is that, all over China, students and other 
thinkers are turning from the confusion of the polit¬ 
ical scene to examine the underlying facts of the 
national life out of which the political scene grows. 
And as these customs, sanctions, and beliefs are dis¬ 
covered, they are made to answer a threefold exam¬ 
ination: What is this? Why is this? What value 
has this for to-day? 

Religion must answer these questions as well as 
the other aspects of Chinese life, and this means not 
only the religions of the past—Taoism, Buddhism, 
Mohammedanism, and Confucianism—but this new 
religion that has made such progress in a century, 
Christianity. Searching indeed have been some of 
the questionings put to Christianity by thinking Chi¬ 
nese during the last two or three years. Some 
earnest people have been greatly alarmed to see their 
faith thus under fire. But they need not have been. 
Christianity fears no honest examination, and these 
leaders in the Chinese Renaissance are honest. In 
fact, if the apostle Paul could walk in China to-day 
and study the methods of the New Tide of Thought, 
he would probably say that these workers for a new 
day are but carrying out the injunction he made 
long ago, “Prove all things $ hold fast that which 
is good.” 

Every school becomes a center for this sort of 
intellectual and social ferment. And with schools 
increasing at the rate that they are in China, this 
means that the New Tide of Thought is constantly 
[ 57 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


flowing into new communities. It is rare, indeed, 
to find a large center now that has not felt its in¬ 
fluence, and the two hundred magazines devoted 
to its purposes are carrying its message where even 
its living exponents have not gone. 

Nor is it to be thought that the supporters of the 
Movement confine themselves to discussions of the¬ 
ory. They are carrying their theories into practice, 
and their examples are more powerful in influencing 
popular opinion than any amount of argument could 
be. When a man whose mind commands respect 
says that the age-old burial customs, with their ac¬ 
companying burden of expense that may tax several 
generations, are not fit for the present, and then 
buries his parents in a quiet, unostentatious manner 
that gives no hint of any lessening of filial piety, 
it is nearly sure to follow that there will be other 
funerals of the same kind in that locality. And 
when a girl who has had unusual educational ad¬ 
vantages refuses to be bound by the old methods 
of match-making, but chooses her life-mate herself 
from those who can afford her mental comradeship, 
all the matrimonial go-betweens in the neighborhood 
foresee the ultimate doom of their profession. So 
it goes. 

If you look at the outer aspects of Chinese life 
today, the picture is gloomy. The country presents 
the aspect of a huge, unwieldy machine, out of all 
control, falling to pieces, and endangering all about 
as it goes to ruin. But when you look below this 
[ 58 ] 


A LAND OF FERMENTING MINDS 


outer aspect and see the workings of such a move¬ 
ment as the New Tide of Thought, you regain hope. 
Such a movement cannot hope to achieve its ends 
in a few months. It is a process that will require 
much time for discovery and correction. But the 
leaders who have forsaken present political activity 
in order that they may ultimately change the civi¬ 
lization of the people, have chosen wisely. If they 
can maintain and attain their purposes, no man can 
put bounds on the future that lies before their 
country. 

This is China’s real revolution, this fermentation 
of the minds of the Chinese. This, and not the war¬ 
fare and brigandage, is what you must study if you 
would know the China that is to be. And it is our 
purpose now, therefore, to consider in four relation¬ 
ships the way in which this true revolution is com¬ 
ing to pass. In the realms of social customs, 
womanhood, industry, and religion, what changes 
are taking place?, 


[ 59 ] 


IV 


‘TROVE ALL THINGS” 

Once upon a time there lived in China a poor 
man with one son. I have forgotten the poor man’s 
name and the son’s name, but we will call them 
Wang. Almost anybody in China who isn’t named 
Li is named Wang. Likewise, at that time, and 
ever since then, in fact, there lived in China a horde 
of mosquitoes. Old Mr. Wang, being a poor man, 
had not the money wherewith to buy himself a mos¬ 
quito net for his bed, so that the pests would hold 
a celebration each night after he had retired, to the 
detriment of the unfortunate man’s repose. At last, 
things reached such a pass that something radical 
had to be done, or old Mr. Wang would have been 
numbered with his ancestors. So young Wang—- 
he was really only a boy—dutifully lay in the bed 
for an hour or more each evening until the mos¬ 
quitoes had gorged themselves on him. Then his 
father could sleep the rest of the night in peace. 

That story, with added details, has been told to 
hundreds of Chinese youngsters, and the sacrifice of 
young Wang—or whatever his name was—has been 
held up during generations as an ideal illustration 
of the working of the greatest of all Chinese virtues, 
filial piety. As far as I know, the story never said 
much about the way in which the boy spent the hours 
after he had finished furnishing a feast for the mos- 
[ 60 ] 


‘TROVE ALL THINGS” 


quitoes. For no Chinese would ever think of asking 
about the boy. Social custom for millenniums has 
decreed that the first business in life is to show def¬ 
erence to parents, and it is only in these days of 
China’s inner revolution that some radicals are be¬ 
ginning to suggest that there may be others with 
rights in such cases. 

The maze of social custom that has bound the old 
China is bewildering to a visitor from the West. 
To reach a banquet and then see the master of cere¬ 
monies argue with some guest for ten or fifteen min¬ 
utes over the place in which the guest is to sit, may 
seem amusing or a useless waste of time, according to 
one’s hunger. The master of ceremonies will ask 
a guest to sit in a certain chair; the guest will say 
that he is totally unworthy of that chair, and start 
toward a less honorable one; the master of cere¬ 
monies will repudiate the suggestion and renew the 
first invitation; the guest will again show reluctance. 
And so on and on and on, until what is to the for¬ 
eigner an invisible point has been reached, the pro¬ 
prieties properly satisfied and the guest takes the 
chair which he has known all the time he would take 
and which he would have been mortally offended 
if he had not been given, as the master of ceremonies 
well knew. 

These social customs have, of course, been a 
growth of ages. When our civilization is as old as 
China’s, we may have as many conventions to which 
to defer. Many think we have enough as it is. 

[ 61 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


But it is astonishing to discover that most of these 
ideas and sanctions were fixed more than two thou¬ 
sand years ago! One of the books that comes down 
from the time of Confucius is known as the Book 
of Rites y and what detailed rules for conduct were 
not crowded into that classic will be found in some 
other of the great sage’s writings. Confucius wanted 
everything done decently and in order. He was a 
ritualist if ever one lived. The legislature of Okla¬ 
homa has been held up to ridicule in some quarters 
for passing on the proper length of hotel bed- 
sheets. But Confucius went the Oklahoma legisla¬ 
tors one better. He meticulously described the 
proper method for getting into bed and out again 
after the sheets had been spread! 

The old type of education in China, which con¬ 
sisted in committing to memory the classics, must 
have had a striking resemblance to the new educa¬ 
tion that Americans are being urged to undertake by 
the advertisements that ask, “What is wrong with 
this picture?” The difference has been that, in 
China, sitting in the presence of one’s parents, or 
such a matter, has not been regarded as merely a 
social blunder, but as a sign of moral turpitude. 

It is this kind of a social heritage that the inner 
revolution, the New Tide of Thought, that we men¬ 
tioned in the previous chapter, is judging. It is tak¬ 
ing all these social customs and sanctions, putting 
them to the tests suggested by the needs of the pres¬ 
ent day, and attempting the enormous task of telling 
[ 62 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 


the Chinese people which ones to discard and which 
ones to alter and which ones to observe unchanged. 
For when this movement attempts to “prove all 
things,” it must accept the social manners of the 
people as among the most important elements in the 
national life. 

Rudyard Kipling once compressed into four lines 
the secret of his ability to understand and interpret 
life: 

I keep six honest serving men 
(They taught me all I knew); 

Their names are What, and Why, and When, 

And How, and Where, and Who. 

The men who are carrying on China’s inner rev¬ 
olution ask much the same questions. Mr. Basil 
Mathews, the English editor, has said of China to¬ 
day: 

“Everything is challenged on the earth and in 
the heavens: religion, marriage, family affection, re¬ 
spect of son for father or pupil for teacher or ser¬ 
vant for master. 

“All the palings are down. No taboos are held 
sacred. Every stone is overturned. Nothing has 
any authority until it has been accepted by the in¬ 
dividual judgment. 

“All despotisms are despised. . . . 

“Every presupposition of the past is challenged 
with a rather strident and quite insistent ‘Why?’ 
It [the New Thought Movement] is a stupen- 
[ 63 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


dous enfant terrible in a three-thousand-year-old 
house. . . . 

“It is out to rebuild the social order from the very 
foundations. It is after a new order at any cost.” 

This challenging of the former ways of living 
might not produce such a strain were it not for the 
fundamental assumption upon which all Chinese 
society is built. This assumption makes the family, 
and not the individual, the social unit. A man has 
meaning, in Chinese eyes, only as a part of a family 
or clan. The honor that comes to one comes also 
to the family. On the other hand, if one person 
goes wrong, the stigma alights upon the whole group. 
The family, for example, is considered as liable for 
debts contracted by any of its members. 

Because this is so, the social practices of the past 
have been calculated to bind the family ever more 
closely together. One did not reverence ancestors 
just for the sake of reverencing ancestors, but as 
an acknowledgment of the unbroken family life. 
And one submitted to a choice of wife or husband 
by parents, not because one had no interest in the 
matter, but because it was the interest of the family 
that must be first taken into account. So through 
all the range of social customs. 

Now the New Tide of Thought declares that the 
individual must be the center of interest. You as 
you, and not merely as one of a great group of 
people all bearing the same surname, must become 
a contributing factor in the state. You must be 
[ 64 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 

held individually responsible, and because of that, 
you must not be required to submit to any line of 
conduct that does not appeal to your own best judg¬ 
ment. You therefore have the right to take up 
any social practice and ask whether or not it is best 
to act in conformity with it in the present day. 

To the mass of Chinese, steeped in the idea of 
the power of the family, any suggestion of under¬ 
mining family authority seems the most dreadful 
sort of impiety. “The family life of China,” they 
will tell you, “has worked out a system, through 
more than forty centuries, whereby people can get 
along with each other in peace. It may have had 
minor imperfections, but on the whole it has brought 
happiness. No well-wisher of China would attack 
our family institutions.” 

Yet that is just what the leaders of the New 
Thought Movement are doing. They deny boldly 
that Chinese family life has been ideal, and that 
its customs should accordingly persist unchanged. 
Early last year a British correspondent interviewed 
Dr. Hu Suh, and later reported in a newspaper 
published in Japan that Dr. Hu had said: 

“The Chinese family system is bad. People talk 
about the harmony of the Chinese family and the 
Chinese village. It is all nonsense. If I should 
go to my home village now, the people would come 
to tell me of their squabbles and probably would 
fight with one another at my gate. There is constant 
discord. It is a bad system.” 

[ 65 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


So, believing that not only the forms, but the 
very spirit of the family life of old China is unfitted 
to furnish the basis of a strong modern state, the 
reformers have begun to bring changes in the struc¬ 
ture. It is surprising to see some of the changes 
that appear to be coming in Chinese family relation¬ 
ships, but it must be remembered that these have 
been proposed only after the former ways had been 
submitted to the most honest appraisal. 

Take the matter of betrothal as an example. 
Child betrothal has been exceedingly common in 
China, and even when this did not occur, the ar¬ 
rangement has been one of convenience between the 
families rather than the individuals immediately 
concerned. It frequently happened that 'betrothed 
couples did not see each other until the hour of their 
wedding. Certain individuals made quite a profitable 
business out of the arrangement of marriages, and 
there was almost none of the personal selection and 
courtship that, in the West, have seemed so precious. 

Yet there were some things to be said for Chinese 
practice. “It may be hard for the romantic West¬ 
erner to conceive of conjugal love existing where 
it never had a chance to grow or develop,” Dr. 
M. T. Z. Tyau has written, “but in view of the fact 
that separations and divorces are practically unknown 
in the unemotional East, it is not so impossible as 
is generally imagined. Has not somebody suggested 
that if we put two people of the opposite sex to¬ 
gether alone, however unattractive they both may 
[ 66 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 

be, in the end they will be mutually attracted to 
each other? . . . Moreover, all parents are reason¬ 
able and wish their children joy. So while some 
may arrange their children’s marriages with an eye 
to the prospective bride or groom’s position or wealth, 
despite the utter incompatibility of the two young 
people, such cannot be predicated in the preponder¬ 
ating majority of cases. In their own light, there¬ 
fore, the parents will arrange the most suitable 
alliances j then the children will live happily, and 
parents, though deceased, will be reverenced as in 
actual life.” 1 

The modern Chinese thinker, however, while ad¬ 
mitting that the old system has a better record in 
the matter of divorce than the Western, is not con¬ 
tent to abide by the ancient customs. He demands 
the right to pick his own life-mate, and to pick her 
—or him, as the case may be—from the number 
of those who can live upon the same intellectual 
plane. 

Many a teacher in a mission school could tell of 
experiences when students have reported their be¬ 
trothal to boys or girls with whom they had no 
intellectual or other sympathy. Chafing under the 
condition, the students will ask the foreigner to help 
them win release from their obligations. Perhaps 
the foreigner attempts to do so—once. After that 
he realizes that questions such as these the Chinese 

1 Tyau, M. T. Z. China Awakened. Macmillan Co., New 
York. 

[ 67 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


must work out for themselves. But there is fre¬ 
quently something pathetic in the way in which these 
youngsters seek escape from customs which reach 
from out the past to clutch them. Especially is this 
the case when their religious faith is involved. The 
Christian preacher who has been handicapped by an 
uneducated wife from a non-Christian home whom 
he felt forced to marry because of a childhood be¬ 
trothal has been too frequent a figure in the Chinese 
Church. And many a girl has gone from a Chris¬ 
tian school to marriage with a non-Christian man, 
feeling that her soul-health was endangered by the 
act. 

You can see that filial piety is closely related to 
this question. The young Chinese who refuses to 
accept a betrothal made by his or her parents is not 
only in rebellion against hoary convention, but is 
popularly condemned for showing a want of filial 
devotion. And that is the worst sin that can be 
charged against a Chinese. Many of the thinkers 
of today are saying that China’s stability has been, 
in large measure, an answer to the promise of the 
Decalog: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that 
thy days may be long in the land.” They realize, 
therefore, that in advocating lines of conduct that 
seemingly undermine parental authority radicals are 
embarking upon a dangerous course. 

In one of the cities of China there was, until a 
year or so ago, a young Chinese woman who had 
earned great prominence as an executive of a Chris- 
[ 68 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 


tian organization. Well educated, her natural ability 
brought her rapidly to the front among the con¬ 
structive workers of that city. But there came a 
time when she seemed to lose interest in her work. 
She moped about her office until finally a foreign 
associate asked her if she were not feeling well. 
Then the whole story came out. 

■ The girl had been betrothed by her family to a 
man in another city. The man was not a Christian, 
and the girl knew nothing of him personally. She 
had held out for months against such a marriage, 
but the weight of family opinion was heavily set 
against her. At last, her mother, who had been un¬ 
usually forbearing, told her that she would regard 
any further refusal as a lack of filial devotion, and 
the result of her Christian associations. 

As much to show that Christianity did not require 
its followers to repudiate their distinctively Chinese 
ideas, as for any other reason, the girl finally mar¬ 
ried the groom selected for her by her parents. And 
to her joy, her husband, while not a Christian, has 
encouraged her in her devotion to her faith, so that 
she has been able to continue to bear an outstanding 
part in the work of the church. Not all are so fortu¬ 
nate. 

What the final outcome will be, it is impossible 
to say. It seems improbable that the staid Oriental 
will ever adopt the promiscuous courtship of the 
West. In fact, some recent radical proposals arising 
out of the student circles, such as the introduction 
[ 69 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

of “free love,” are likely to produce a reaction 
toward conservatism. But in the long run the re¬ 
formers, if successful, will secure some sort of basis 
for the formation of the family that does not so 
largely ignore the feelings of those most involved. 

When it comes to the celebration of marriage rites 
the changes again are many. The leaders of the 
Renaissance are not opposed to the old ceremonies 
because of any lack of beauty, because there was a 
dignity about some of the marriage rites that was 
profoundly impressive. But marriages frequently 
involved a cost that was out of all relation to the 
means of the family, and left a burden of debt of 
staggering proportions. To meet this debt the cus¬ 
tom grew of requiring wedding guests to contribute 
heavily, which was as hard on the guests as it might 
otherwise have been on the family. 

It was never my fortune to attend one of the 
old-style weddings in China. Sometimes I have 
seen the heavily decorated and curtained bridal car¬ 
riage or sedan chair before the door of the bride’s 
home, and have seen the bride in her crimson gown, 
with the pink veil across her face, come forth for 
her ride to her new home, with all her dowry— 
furniture, dress-stuffs, clocks, and the wedding feast 
—following behind her. 

Friends have told me of those ceremonies, with 
the couple bowing the required number of times 
before each pair of parents, before the ancestral 
[ 70 ] 



% 


IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD ON WHICH SIDE OF 
THE FENCE ONE STANDS—WHEN ON THE OTHER SIDE IS 
A MISSION PLAYGROUND. 
















Bp Hspw'Clp 

. M ii 

gpv ** i. 

jt 4 



ll 1 




* 

Sjr 


FAMILIAR SIGHTS IN CHINA’S FUNERAL PROCESSIONS ! A DWELLING 
AND ATTENDANTS, WHICH WILL BE BURNED AT THE GRAVE 
FOR THE USE OF THE DEAD IN THE SPIRIT WORLD. 












“PROVE ALL THINGS” 


tablets, before the household gods, before the pro¬ 
fessional go-betweens who arranged the match, and 
before the guests. Then came the climactic moment, 
when the veil was thrown back and the groom, per¬ 
haps for the first time, saw his wife. There must 
have been plenty of weddings when the unveiling 
provided anything but a happy surprise. Indeed, 
my wife happened once to be a guest at a state wed¬ 
ding, when the groom took no pains to hide his rage 
at the disclosure of the somewhat ample features 
of the bride whom his parents had secured for him. 

Great were the feastings that invariably followed, 
and the buffoonery that broke out must have been 
terrifying to the poor girl who was its victim. Yet 
custom decreed that if she, by so much as a glance, 
gave any indication of annoyance, she should be re¬ 
garded as lacking in matronly poise. 

The festivities connected with weddings held in 
humble homes near my own frequently lasted for 
the better part of a week, and must have left all 
the participants unfit for any real work for some 
time after that. 

All sorts of attempts are being made nowadays 
to work out a form of marriage that will be inex¬ 
pensive, solemn, Chinese in spirit, and without the 
boisterous and sometimes repulsive horseplay for¬ 
merly indulged in. Thus, Dr. Tyau tells of the 
marriage of two students who had studied outside 
China. The ceremony followed this order: 

[ 71 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


1. Music. 

2 . The guests were seated. 

3. The witness took up his position. 

4. The go-betweens took their positions. 

5. The best man escorted the groom to the witness,. 

6 . The bridesmaids escorted the bride to the witness, 

7. Music. 

8 . The witness read the marriage certificate. 

9. The groom put the ring on the bride’s finger. 

10. The bride and bridegroom bowed to each other twice. 

11 . The bride and bridegroom bowed to the witness. 

12. The bride and bridegroom bowed to the go-betweens. 

13. The bride and bridegroom bowed to the guests. The 

guests arose to return the bow. 

14. The bride and bridegroom bowed three times to their 
relatives. 

15. Music. 

The ceremony in this case, it will be seen, was in 
charge of an official witness. The certificate read: 

T. L. K. of Chihli Province, and S. J. S. of Chekiang Prov¬ 
ince, having agreed to be married to each other, are today, the 
28th day of June, 1918, united in wedlock before the witness 
T. Y. P. The affections of the two are overflowing and will 
continue though their hairs turn gray. 

(Signed) T. Y. P., T. L. K., S. J. S., S. C. 

In the case of Christians there is also an attempt 
to combine the ceremonies that the churches of the 
West have evolved with ancient Chinese usage. In 
one wedding in Shanghai the Western form was fol- 

[ 72 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 

lowed exclusively, save that the groom, seeing the 
bride approaching down the church aisle, hastened, 
with his best man, to greet her, and the procession 
approached the altar four abreast; that, at the close 
of the ceremony, the newly wedded couple made 
ceremonial bows to their guests 5 and that the guests, 
being unfamiliar with some of the technique of 
Western weddings, pelted the two with rice as soon 
as they started to march away from the altar. At 
the wedding feast that followed this same occasion, 
an attempt was made to introduce the old-style horse¬ 
play, drinking the groom under the table, and the 
like. But the groom, with a little tact and firmness, 
quickly stopped this. 

More important than rites, if the young Chinese 
is to be allowed to pick his or her life-mate, is the 
inculcation of proper standards of choice. It is of 
more than passing significance to find the Chinese 
Ladles Journal running an article on “Selecting a 
Husband,” and giving voice to sentiments such as 
these: 

“According to modern Chinese custom a son or 
daughter has the right to make his or her own choice 
in matrimony without interference from the parents. 
Chinese, for thousands of years, have followed the 
custom of having such choice made by the parents 
instead of by the couples themselves. This bad 
custom often caused unhappiness, because the parents 
cared very little for the element of love between 
the young people. Since Western civilization came 
[ 73 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


eastward this custom has gradually changed. Young 
lovers have often misused the term Tree marriage, J 
and considerable immorality has resulted. 

“Since love should be lifelong, and as there is 
nothing so fine as love, the marriage of young people 
should not be decided upon in a hurry. It is nec¬ 
essary to investigate habits and character with great 
care, so as to avoid future regrets on the part of 
the contracting parties. The following are the im¬ 
portant points for Chinese women to consider in 
making their choice, and I should like to bring them 
forth and discuss them with young girls who are 
looking for husbands.” 

Then follows a discussion of the necessary list 
of qualifications, in this order: appearance and knowl¬ 
edge, age, occupation, property, relations, health, liv¬ 
ing habits, temper, character, purpose, and general 
considerations. And the editor closes with this ex¬ 
hortation: 

“The other points may be learned by interview 
or by correspondence, or by getting information from 
his neighbors. If his morals are satisfactory, an en¬ 
gagement may be entered into. In this way you 
will never regret your action. . . . Don’t be too 
shy to investigate. This is a matter of great im¬ 
portance for your lifelong happiness.” 

Another social custom that is slowly retreating 
before the attack of the reformers is that of foot¬ 
binding. Here the influence of Christianity has been 
marked, for the agitation against foot-binding first 
[ 74 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 

found expression in Christian circles. It was when 
the missionaries began to refuse admission to their 
schools to girls with bound feet that the custom re¬ 
ceived its first bad setback, and in all the succeeding 
years the Christians have never let up on this fight. 

Just how far this reform has progressed is hard 
to say. In some parts of the country the women 
on the farms have never been cursed with the de¬ 
formity. In most of the port cities there are few 
girls or young women whose feet are bound. But 
in the interior cities and other out-of-the-way parts 
of China, the bound foot still flourishes. A friend 
of mine who traveled in progressive Shansi Province 
a year ago reports that he did not see a single female, 
save infants, without bound feet. The students, 
however, maintain that the custom is passing every¬ 
where, and will soon disappear. 

A more serious problem is that presented by con¬ 
cubinage. It is hard to say whether the leaders of 
the New Tide have reached any clear stand on this 
question as yet, although there are many individuals 
who have come out strongly against the custom. 
Concubinage, it should be understood, arises gener¬ 
ally out of the desire for male offspring, and is 
sometimes urged upon a husband by his wife when 
there are no male children to carry on the family 
name. It is considered a terrible thing in China 
to allow a family to die out. 

Christianity has also found it difficult to deal with 
this question. Almost all churches refuse baptism 
[ 75 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


to men with more than one wife, but this has neces¬ 
sitated keeping out sincere converts who have felt 
that, in view of the social disgrace involved, it would 
be unjust to turn out secondary wives taken before 
their conversion. I well remember a teacher of 
Chinese, whose secondary wife was keeping him out 
of church membership, who could not see why he 
should be required to put her away while Abraham, 
Moses, David, and other Old Testament worthies 
were being held up to him as patterns of faith and 
piety! 

It is certain, however, that the New Tide will 
have to deal with this question. At present, it is 
embarrassed by the action of some students who, 
having studied abroad, and returning to China to 
find family-chosen brides without education await¬ 
ing them, have seen in a second marriage a solution 
for the dilemma. Such students have married the 
first wife to satisfy family claims and the second to 
find a real life-mate. These cases have been, how¬ 
ever, comparatively rare. 

In the long run, the New Tide will insist that 
concubinage go. It cannot stand up before that in¬ 
sistent “Why?” It brings discord into too many 
homes. Monogamy proves itself, by the best scien¬ 
tific tests, the only sure basis for a country. 

Somewhat connected with the custom of concubi¬ 
nage is that of holding household slaves. Many 
Chinese will insist that “slave” is too strong a word 
to use in this connection, since the girl is only held 
[ 76 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 


during her girlhood. But it must be admitted that 
the girls sold by their needy families to work for 
more prosperous ones do live in virtual slavery. The 
end of their years of labor may be marriage, or it 
may be concubinage, or it may be far worse. And 
during the years of bondage the girl servant is as 
much a chattel as though she were in prison. 

Household slavery in China has recently attracted 
attention in the West because the custom, naturally, 
had found a foothold in the British colony of Hong¬ 
kong. The matter was brought to the attention of 
the House of Commons, quick to uphold the boast 
that where the Union Jack floats all men are free. 
In Hongkong itself the agitation had large Christian 
and Chinese backing, although it must be confessed 
that some of the foreigners with business interests 
in the city were very slow in lending support. The 
law as finally passed provided that on January 1, 
1923, all household slaves should be freed. The 
thrusting of this great crowd of young girls on their 
own resources in such a city has placed a heavy tax 
upon the Christian and student leaders. Agitation 
will now go forward to extend this reform to other 
parts of China. 

It would be easy to devote this entire chapter to 
the changes that are coming in the burial customs 
of China. Burial seems always to have occupied a 
large place in Chinese life. Perhaps that is because 
of the high death-rate, with the average expectation 
of life, if one is lucky enough to be one of the thirty 
[77] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


per cent or so who survive infancy, being only some¬ 
thing like twenty-four years. In every part of the 
country there are great tracts, frequently very valu¬ 
able land, given over to graves. One passes them 
in such numbers that one comes to sympathize with 
the man who said that what China needed was the 
gospel of cremation! 

The Chinese funeral has become a most expensive 
affair. In some parts of the country it may last for 
months, with frequent ceremonies attendant upon 
the varnishing of a casket or upon the return of 
Buddhist and Taoist priests for another period of 
chanting. There are grandsons in China today who 
are eating the bitterness of grinding poverty in an 
attempt to pay the funeral expenses of their grand¬ 
fathers. 

In the city of Changsha, near the center of China, 
where the medical school and college supported by 
Yale University is located, there is a little Christian 
servant whose name, appropriately enough, is Valiant 
One. For months the child had been trying to in¬ 
terest her family in the religion she had found in 
the mission church, when suddenly her eldest sister’s 
little son and daughter died. It seems likely that 
the children were stricken with meningitis, but the 
distracted family blamed it upon the foreign religion 
and the outraging of local spirits by a neighboring 
family. 

“Curses of all the gods on Valiant One!” 
screamed her grandfather to the assembled neighbor- 
[ 78 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 


hood. “Curses, black curses, on the Chang family! 
Valiant One follows the foreign devils. The Chang 
family build a wall and anger the spirits. The spirits 
steal the lives of our beloved little ones. Curses! 
Curses! Curses!” 

A missionary friend of the trembling little con¬ 
vert tried to quiet the storm, but the old man per¬ 
sisted. 

“They build the wall. The spirits are angry. 
They carry off the souls of our children. The death 
of our children be on the Chang family! Let them 
bury them! They will have to bury them. What 
is more, they must buy fine, big caskets of the best 
wood, not small ones, but big ones, finely decorated. 
They must give the feast. Curse them!” 

The missionary tried to reason. “The Changs 
are not responsible. This was some sudden sick¬ 
ness.” 

The old man would not listen. “The Changs are 
responsible. Were not the children well this morn¬ 
ing? Are they not dead now? Who else could be 
the cause?” And the howling family and neighbors 
echoed the charges of the grandfather. 

The missionary visited the Changs. They were 
miserably poor, and desperately frightened. No¬ 
body had made any objection previously to their 
building a little mud wall. What were they to do? 
Two of them were Christians—which may have 
been the reason why the grandfather had so quickly 
perceived their guilt—and the others all seemed 
[79] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


eager to follow any advice the foreigner might give. 
The missionary could only suggest that they do noth¬ 
ing and see if all did not turn out well. 

It did not. That afternoon a Chang came fran¬ 
tically to the missionary. 

“Oh, foreign teacher,” he cried, “what are we 
to do now? The Fengs have put their dead children 
in our beds. We did not see them do it. Oh, we 
are lost! We have no money even for rice. How 
can we buy caskets and have a feast? How can we? 
How can we?” 

“Appeal to the magistrate,” suggested the mis¬ 
sionary. 

“No use; no use! The Fengs are related to a 
powerful outlaw, and even the official is afraid of 
the outlaws. Oh, they will tear down our house, 
break all our things, and kill us! Woe! Woe!” 

The Changs bought the caskets and gave the feast. 
The Fengs forced them to the very limit of extrav¬ 
agance; they mortgaged themselves and all their 
little property for years to come. On the last day 
of the burial ceremonies the old grandfather, ex¬ 
hausted by his anger and the excitement, suddenly 
died, so that the tumult was loosed all over again. 
The life of the little Christian girl was only safe 
after she had been given work in a foreigner’s home; 
the Changs are reduced to lifelong drudgery. All 
this as a result of the deaths of two children. 

Against the extravagant outlays upon burials the 
new movement in China is setting all the force of 
[ 80 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 


its influence. To be sure, the reformers find the 
task difficult, for the popular verdict is likely to 
be that one who does not make a display at the death 
of a parent is lacking in filial piety. But there is 
so much common sense behind this reform that it 
is bound, in time, to win. 

The New Tide of Thought does not reject utterly 
the custom that has been known in the West as an¬ 
cestor worship. It sees much good accruing from 
a recognition of the link with the past. It rejects 
the idea of worship, but it suggests that a proper 
commemoration of the virtues of the dead may be 
of help in holding up the standards of character. 
With this view, Chinese Christians find much in 
common, and, while they refuse to go through any 
forms that might be mistaken for worship, they are 
more and more coming to methods of commemora¬ 
tion that will express the genius of their nation and 
still be recognized as Christian. 

With the new age there have come to China many 
forms of social indulgence that give the leaders of 
the New Tide profound concern. Some of these, 
such as the prevalence of graft, are not new phe¬ 
nomena. But all of them seem in these days to be 
obtaining a power that makes them increasingly a 
menace to the public welfare. For this reason the 
reformers are trying to deal with gambling, graft¬ 
ing, drinking, and the social evil in the most cou¬ 
rageous way. Not only are they working within the 
student bodies where, alas, much needs to be done 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


along these lines, but they are trying to show the 
menace of these evils to the general public. In this, 
of course, they have the support of Christian bodies, 
and, in fact, many of the methods used have been 
devised by Christian agencies. 

It must not be thought that the social reforms 
mentioned in this chapter have become universal 
throughout China. Some of them have barely be¬ 
gun to affect even the centers where the student in¬ 
fluence is strongest. Social customs take a long time 
in the changing anywhere, and particularly in as 
conservative and massive a land as China. 

But these changes are suggestive of the conditions 
that the New Tide has faced with its relentless 
“Why?” And it can be seen that, in attacking such 
evils as these, the New Tide is really going to the 
roots of China’s difficulties. In the long run the 
wisdom of the new social modes should be sufficient 
to insure their adoption. 

“Hold fast that which is good,” said the apostle. 
The Chinese will always be ready to do that. But 
it is significant that, with the prestige of four thou¬ 
sand years of acceptance behind them, the reform 
leaders still insist that the social customs of China 
shall prove themselves good. There is more than 
hope for a land where that spirit lives. And, for 
Christians, there must be cheer in the realization 
that, as these issues come up for discussion, in prac¬ 
tically every instance the leaders of the New Tide, 
although they may not call themselves Christians, 
[ 82 ] 


“PROVE ALL THINGS” 

are arriving at positions with which Christians are 
in accord. 

Nor is this strange, for most of these social re¬ 
forms have been advocated by Christians for years. 
The Christians may have been too few in numbers 
to bring such matters to the attention of much of 
the public, but at least their testimony has been clear. 
Now that reformers are coming from other sources, 
they must consider these Christian standards of so¬ 
cial conduct. And the inevitable result has been 
that, as these honest leaders have studied these 
standards, they have acknowledged their value and 
have adopted them. So that it is possible to trace 
most of the changes that are coming among China’s 
social customs directly back to Christian pioneering 
in the obscure years of the past. It was the Chris¬ 
tian, after all, who first began to “prove all things.” 


[S3] 


V 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 

Christian circles in Foochow had been stirred to 
their depths by a wedding. Out of the West, di¬ 
rectly from years of study overseas, had come a 
young Chinese doctor to claim the favorite pupil 
in the mission girls’ school as his bride. “A beauti¬ 
ful Christian home” was expected by everyone to 
result from the marriage. 

The day after the wedding the missionary who 
had been almost a foster-mother to the girl was sit¬ 
ting in her office, going over in her mind the events 
of the previous day. How smoothly everything 
had gone! How sweet the bride had looked, with 
her embroidered scarlet dress and slippers! Surely 
it had been “a good job well done,” and deserved 
a day of rest. 

Suddenly the door burst open and in rushed the 
little bride. 

“Dear teacher,” she sobbed, “dear teacher, how 
can I stand it? How can I tell you? I am dis¬ 
graced ! ” 

“Disgraced! What do you mean?” 

“My husband! He has disgraced me! I never 
want to see him again!” 

Here was a strange outcome to the joyous fes¬ 
tivities of the previous day! And it was a long 
time before the missionary had calmed her protegee 
[ 84 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


enough to learn the details of the “disgrace” that her 
husband had brought upon her. But finally she dis¬ 
covered what had happened. 

After the wedding, there had been a reception. 
And to the guests, who were speaking in English 
because of the presence of foreigners and Chinese 
from regions using different dialects, the doctor had 
introduced his bride as “my wife.” So she had left 
him! 

If this sounds like a mystery to you, so did it 
that afternoon to that missionary in Foochow. But 
the mystery cleared as the heart-broken bride stum¬ 
bled ahead through the tale of her grief. 

You see, the bride had learned her English in 
the mission school, where the Bible had been read 
with great thoroughness, both in Chinese and in 
English. And, insensibly, words in the English ver¬ 
sion came to have for her their literal value in the 
Chinese. As she read in English, her mind uncon¬ 
sciously supplied meanings from the parallel pas¬ 
sages in Chinese. 

Unfortunately for her, the Chinese version which 
thus formed her English dictionary was an early 
one, made by a missionary with a restricted knowl¬ 
edge of the new language, but a determination to 
pass the gospel into a new tongue without delay. 
And the only way in which that could be done was 
to have the missionary render the meaning of the 
passages in such colloquial Chinese as he could mus¬ 
ter, and then trust a Chinese writer of the old school 
[ 85 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


to turn that meaning into the classical literary form 
required by tradition. A procedure which, obvi¬ 
ously, left the missionary largely at the mercy of 
the writer, and required a new translation before 
many years had passed. Yet the result was better 
than might have been expected. 

So it was that the missionary and his collaborator 
did their task. And if you will examine the gospels, 
you will see that they could not go far in any one 
of them without running into that word that had 
caused so quick a tragedy in the new family— 
“wife.” Naturally, that was not a word that gave 
the missionary-translator trouble. Nor did the brush 
of the old-style Chinese writer ever hesitate when 
it was dictated to him. Time after time, as it re¬ 
curred, he put down two characters that for “ten 
thousand ages” had been used in the same connec¬ 
tion. 

Those were the two characters that popped into 
the mind of the girl in the mission school every time, 
in her English Bible, she read “wife.” And those 
were the two characters that rose to torment her 
when her husband introduced her to his friends. 
And those two characters sent her back to her teacher 
with her heart broken but her jaw set. She would 
not live with a man who called her those two char¬ 
acters. For those two characters, literally translated, 
were “old horse”! 

That bit of a sidelight on the difficulties of passing 
thought from one culture to another, which came so 
[ 86 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


near to wrecking what is today one of the happiest 
homes in China, summarizes much of the ancient 
attitude of China toward her women. Dr. Ch’en 
Huan-chang, a brilliant American-educated expo¬ 
nent of Confucianism, has argued that, in the eyes 
of China’s greatest sage, women stood on an equality 
with men, and that may be so. But the fact is that, 
both in law and in custom, China’s women have for 
ages been treated as inferior to her men. In this 
China has not stood alone. There are still Christian 
nations in which the legal rights of women suffer 
in comparison with those of men. But in China 
too frequently social custom has operated even more 
disadvantageous^, from the woman’s standpoint, 
than law. 

Woman has been at a disadvantage in the marital 
relation. To be sure, if it has been true that many 
women have not seen their mates until they met 
at the wedding altar, it has been equally true that 
the same number of husbands have blindly accepted 
the wives chosen by their families. Yet, taken from 
their own homes into families where custom has 
frequently seemed to demand severity upon the part 
of the elder members, many a young wife has felt 
that all she could do was to grit her teeth and bear 
her trials until the passing of years gave her a chance 
to rule over the wives of her sons. 

In the letter of the law, divorce has always threat¬ 
ened the Chinese wife upon ridiculously easy terms. 
Any wife could be put away whose husband could 
[ 87 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


complain of her barrenness, her unchastity, her dis¬ 
regard for her husband’s parents, her talkativeness, 
her thieving, her bad temper, or her lack of good 
health. In practice, however, divorce has been, until 
recently, largely unknown. The practice of concu¬ 
binage and plural marriage has entered into this 
situation. 

Conditions in the homes have been anything but 
attractive, but Chinese women of the past have been 
rather rigidly held to their own hearths. Except in 
the mansions of the wealthy, there has been little 
attempt to secure comfort or beauty, and this, as 
has been pointed out in the investigation recently 
made of the city of Peking, has had much to do 
with driving men in the cities to the hectic amuse¬ 
ments to be found elsewhere. 

The extent to which many Chinese women have 
become drudges, without hope for relief, constantly 
amazes Westerners. In Hangchow recently a mill- 
worker fell under the attention of a missionary. 
Because of an incurable sickness, there were days 
when the pay this woman brought home from the 
mill was very small. And on these days she was 
always brutally beaten by her mother-in-law. It 
was clear that the woman could not much longer 
survive such treatment. Yet when a missionary 
sought a Chinese who might give competent advice, 
his interpretation concluded: 

“The law does not make her stay with her cruel 
mother-in-law, but it does make her stay with her 
[ 88 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 

husband. If the husband is unwilling to leave his 
mother and set up a separate home, then his wife 
can only eat the bitterness. The husband can ex¬ 
hort his mother to treat his wife kindly, but the 
mother has power to command her son to do as she 
wishes, and he must treat her with respectful obedi¬ 
ence.” 

For generations the Chinese have quoted this 
proverb: “A woman without talent is virtuous.” 
That has represented to many the ideal for woman¬ 
hood, the woman who knows that her place is in 
the home, or on the little farm-patch, living from 
one day to another without any interests beyond those 
immediately connected with the nourishment and 
clothing of her family. 

However, in reporting these things that are true, 
it is easy to give an untruthful impression as to the 
actual conditions and position of the women of 
China. Even in the old China, woman’s lot was 
a long way from being as hard as the West has 
sometimes believed it to have been. There is some¬ 
thing in the experience of hundreds of centuries that 
accustoms one to conditions that, to a Westerner, 
might seem intolerable, so that they are never ques¬ 
tioned. And again, it has happened that, by too 
much emphasis upon unusual cases, the situation as 
a whole has not been properly suggested. 

The truth is that the unusual case could be em¬ 
ployed to give a favorable impression of the position 
of Chinese women that would be as distorted as has 
[ 89 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


been the old one. One might tell, for example, of 
that woman who began her career as an inconspicu¬ 
ous secondary wife from a minor branch of the Man- 
chu household and ended it, only sixteen years ago, 
as the world-famous Empress Dowager. If you 
wish to read fascinating biography, try the life story 
of this woman, who, with the exception of Catherine 
of Russia, was probably the most powerful woman 
ruler that the world has ever known. 

Nor is this example of a woman’s achievement 
as unique in Chinese history as might be supposed. 
For of the 1,628 volumes in the Chinese biographi¬ 
cal dictionary, 376 dealt with the lives of illustrious 
women. However much the law may have left her 
to her own resources, when one of these women has 
possessed initiative and personal force, she has been 
able to win a place of power in the same way that 
women have won such places in the West. 

Let us not make the mistake of thinking of this 
power as reserved for women of the courts. In the 
homelier but more important realm of the ordinary 
family life, the Chinese woman has been far from 
being the poor tormented drab she has been pictured. 

While living in the city of Nanking, our little 
family found it necessary, because of a shortage of 
missionary houses, to occupy a Chinese dwelling in a 
Chinese section. The houses were very flimsily built, 
and, in order to save material, the wall of our house 
was the wall of our neighbor’s. Our neighbors heard 
everything that went on in our family, and we heard 
[90] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


everything that went on in theirs. Mrs. Hutchinson, 
before the year was out, established quite a neigh¬ 
borhood reputation for herself as an unofficial arbi¬ 
trator of family disputes. And in that intimate 
cross-section of Chinese life we found that there 
were at least as many homes where the woman was 
boss as there were where the man ruled! 

Just behind us lived a farmer who cultivated a 
small truck-patch. He kept the affection of his wife 
by beating her regularly. Across the alley, in a 
thatched hut, dwelt a mighty ricksha-puller who 
gloried in the nickname of “Little Horse.” He 
lived in abject terror of his wife. And when eve¬ 
ning came there were husbands all around us who 
would slink off to the corner tea-house, while their 
wives stood bawling after them from the doorway, 
daring them to come home. Before we had lived 
under those conditions long, we discovered, as is the 
case in some Western communities, that the question 
as to whether or not the woman was a subservient 
slave in the house was largely a question of the 
personal factors involved. 

The finger of scorn had sometimes been pointed 
at China because of the illiteracy of her women. 
No one has seen more clearly the weakness that the 
state has courted through this lack of education for 
its women than China’s own reformers, who, in re¬ 
cent years, have opened all government schools on 
equal terms to women and men. 

But, in a country where the margin of existence 

[ 91 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


is so narrow, and where the business of a woman 
is, first of all to rear a family, it can be seen that 
few women would have the opportunity for the 
twenty years of study necessary to obtain the old 
classical education. 

China’s women, however, are far from fools. 
That same close margin of existence that keeps them 
out of school forces them to sharpen their wits until, 
in the ceaseless bargaining that accompanies every 
Oriental transaction, they may be sure not to be 
worsted. There are many realms of knowledge that 
are totally unknown to the ordinary Chinese woman, 
but when it comes to the business of living, of keep¬ 
ing a household going, of providing that corrective 
advice without which any husband will occasionally 
make wrong choices, the women of China are as capa¬ 
ble as those of any other part of the world. 

Probably the most cruel misunderstanding cur¬ 
rent in the West has been that charging China’s 
mothers with almost universal infanticide. We have 
told ourselves that human nature is much the same 
the world around, yet in this respect we have made 
ourselves believe that the women of China are not 
like others, and we have fallen victims to a legend of 
a land echoing with the cries of babies being tor¬ 
tured. 

No one will say that girl babies have never been 
killed or sold in China. Both things have happened. 
They have happened in America, as we have had 
official and horrible evidence to prove. The press 
[ 92 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


of poverty, and sometimes other motives, bring par¬ 
ents to the point where they will commit deeds for 
which there is no rational explanation. But to take 
these as normal pictures of the total womanhood 
of China is as false as it would be to take the re¬ 
sults of the vice investigations made in certain Amer¬ 
ican cities as normal pictures of the womanhood of 
America. 

When our family was living in such enforced in¬ 
timacy with the Chinese in Nanking, there were three 
babies in our home whom we loved, we thought, as 
much as it was possible for babies to be loved. Yet 
we found that we did not love our children a bit 
more than the parents all about us loved theirs. In¬ 
deed, to the Chinese it must have seemed that we 
did not love our children as well. For the Chinese 
child is generally despot of the household, while 
we did attempt to curb our youngsters occasionally. 

Not only in respect to China and her women, but 
toward every country we, as Christians, need to ap¬ 
ply one of the first corollaries of the Golden Rule: 
“Think of others as you would have others think 
of you.” 

Suppose a Chinese student in America should clip, 
during his four years of residence, every newspaper 
report of a murder, of a race riot, of a dope or liquor 
orgy, of a defiance of law such as burst out in the 
city of Omaha a few years ago when the city hall 
was burned and the mob tried to hang the mayor 
at a lamp-post. Suppose he should take that back 
[93] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


to China and present it as a picture of America. 
What a howl we should send up! Is it any won¬ 
der, then, that as the Chinese woman begins to learn 
how she has been regarded in Western lands, she 
is protesting that she has not been understood at all, 
but caricatured? 

For even the meager basis of truth that lay be¬ 
hind all these misconceptions of China’s women is 
passing. China’s under-the-surface revolution is 
bringing forward a new type of womanhood. Soon 
the conception of Chinese women that dates back 
to reports twenty years old will be as out of date 
as a picture of American women would be that de¬ 
picted them with the styles and the interests and 
ideas of the Civil War period. 

If you were to board the Shanghai-Peking express 
train some day in September, it might easily chance 
that there would sit across the aisle a Chinese woman 
traveling alone. Her hair might be bobbed 5 she 
might be wearing the same sort of silk hosiery that 
is worn in the West; her eyebrows might be plucked 5 
her cheeks rouged; her lips reddened. At her wrist 
she might be carrying a cigarette case. She might 
be returning home from a day at the races, where 
she had lost her wager on the favorite horse in the 
annual Grand Champions. 

Such a picture is not very attractive, yet it is one 
that may be encountered in these changing days in 
China. It needs to be introduced here to strike a 
balance with the ideas of Chinese women that many 
[ 94 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


have held. For it is possible to say that this woman 
is no more representative than the woman at the 
other extreme, and that, between the two, there is 
emerging a new type of Chinese woman who will 
play a large part in the nation’s future. 

The new type of Chinese woman is an eager stu¬ 
dent. When missionaries first opened schools for 
girls in China, they seemed to be facing the most 
impregnable opposition in the world. How many 
a devoted teacher of those days, as she planned how 
she might induce a handful of girls to enter her 
school, must have felt that the ramparts of con¬ 
servatism were impregnable and could never be 
stormed? Today there do not begin to be enough 
schools to care for the thousands of Chinese girls 
who are seeking an education. 

Government schools are now co-educational from 
the primary grades to the university. Mission 
schools have not yet carried the co-educational experi¬ 
ment, except in one or two cases, above the primary 
school. In some respects the mission schools are con¬ 
sidered superior to those under governmental aus¬ 
pices, but the teaching in an institution like the 
National University at Peking or the Southeastern 
University at Nanking is not to be despised. 

The courses offered women are substantially those 
followed in the schools and colleges of America. 
There are one or two special schools, such as the 
Normal School for Physical Education conducted by 
the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the 
[ 95 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


courses in home economics offered now in several 
places, that are preparing groups for forms of com¬ 
munity service that will be of large value. The 
majority of the students follow what would gener¬ 
ally be called a regular liberal arts course. To be 
sure, higher education can only be offered a small 
proportion of the girls who start the primary courses. 
But the costs involved do not permit more than a 
small proportion to seek such education. 

Hundreds of Chinese girls have gone abroad to 
study. In the beginning, most of these were sent 
by the women’s missionary societies, eager for a well- 
trained Chinese corps of workers. Today, girls are 
entering the competitive examinations that provide 
scholarships for overseas study, and others are going 
at their own expense. There are about two hundred 
Chinese girls at present studying in the schools of 
America. 

The same spirit of independence that marks the 
boys is to be found in the girl students. Sometimes 
this leads to complications in school discipline. About 
half the students in one mission school for girls 
in Hangchow went on strike last year because the 
matron had been accused of striking one of the high 
school pupils. They secured rooms in the Lawyers’ 
Association building, invited teachers from other 
schools to carry on their classes voluntarily, and 
then, with a large amount of public support, refused 
to return to their regular classes until the matron 
had been dismissed. It can be seen that this sort 
[ 96 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


of spirit, while it grows out of a passion for justice 
and for freedom for the individual, has in it the 
seeds of much trouble. 

A better sign of the independent spirit of China’s 
new women students is to be found in the group 
of twenty who journeyed to Japan in 1923 to com¬ 
pete in the Far Eastern tennis championships. A 
few years ago such an adventure for Chinese girls 
would have been beyond the bounds of possibility. 
It shows the self-reliance of the new Chinese woman 
at its best. 

These girl students have taken an active part in 
the Student Movement as it has sought to deal with 
China’s political problems. Sometimes they have 
shown even a clearer insight and a more far-seeing 
vision than the agitators from the boys’ schools. In 
1919, for example, when the cry for the return of 
Tsingtau was raised, the girls from St. Mary’s Hall, 
a mission school in Shanghai, issued this proclama¬ 
tion : 

“Our first object is to help to build a greater 
China for the future. It is a big task and it is not 
a thing that we can accomplish in a day or two, but 
it is something that we have to try to do all through 
life. We must therefore be patient in our effort. 
It would be splendid to succeed in our demonstration 
about Tsingtau, but that alone would not be enough, 
for we want to do our part in building a strong 
China. This requires time, but if we, the people of 
the land, have true patriotism and develop it in 
[ 97 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


the right way, a future righteous China is bound to 
come. In carrying out this aim we do not want to 
be too violent in our actions at one time and then 
let our patriotic feelings fade away as time goes on. 
If we are too excited now and try to do things that 
are beyond our capacity, we are harming rather than 
helping China, for such actions, unless they are 
wisely planned, may lead to lifelong regret, and 
that will not be true patriotism. Even though we 
lose Tsingtau temporarily, we can surely get it and 
all our lands back if our country is strong in time 
to come. So let us strive, not only for the present 
student demonstration, but also for a strong China.” 

Many a Chinese woman, however, cannot go to 
school. She may make a start, but before she has 
gone far the bony fingers of want stretch out to 
take her from the school-bench to the loom or the 
rice-field. Elsewhere we shall consider the part that 
industry is playing in the making of a new China. 
Here it is enough to say that at least eighty per 
cent of the thousands of operatives in the cotton 
and silk mills—the backbone of the new industry— 
are women and children, and that thirty-five per 
cent of all the workers in all forms of labor in 
the entire country are estimated by competent ob¬ 
servers to fall into the same classification. 

The woman and girl who leaves home before day¬ 
light to labor for twelve hours or more in the pulsing 
atmosphere of a modern machine-filled factory can 
never be the same kind of woman as the one who 
[ 98 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


scarcely stirs outside her dooryard from week-end 
to week-end. And the instant a woman begins to 
be paid, however poorly, in cash rather than in food 
and clothing and shelter, she is sure to assume a 
different attitude toward any position in her com¬ 
munity. 

Women are entering many lines of industry, not 
only as laborers, but as leaders. One Chinese woman 
covered the Paris Peace Conference as a reporter 
for certain Canton newspapers. There are said to 
be more than forty factories in Canton owned and 
operated by women. A woman is clerk of the Can¬ 
tonese parliament, and edits the “Parliamentary 
Record.” On the Canton-Shamshui railway women 
act as secretaries, ticket collectors, and inspectors. 
Leave progressive Canton, and in Shanghai you find 
a woman as manager of the Ladies 5 Savings Depart¬ 
ment of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank. 
You will find a group of women promoting a 
woman’s bank in Peking. Make your way far in¬ 
land to Nanchang, capital of the province of Kiangsi, 
and you find a woman owning and operating the 
city’s electric light and telephone plants. 

In professional life Chinese women are coming 
more and more to the fore. Teaching, nursing, and 
medicine are the callings that make the most appeal, 
although there are many other lines in which women 
are finding a place. More attention has probably 
been given to the women doctors of China than to 
any other of the new type of Chinese women. For 
[ 99 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


years the work of women like Dr. Mary Stone, now 
of Shanghai, or Dr. Li Bi Cui, of a city far in the 
interior of Fukien province, has been known through¬ 
out China and elsewhere. A conspicuous member 
of the same group has been Dr. Ida Kahn, a class¬ 
mate of Dr. Stone’s at the University of Michigan, 
and the head of a great hospital in Nanchang. 

Dr. Kahn is one of those dynamic women who 
seem to have time to do anything. Not only does 
she run a large hospital, but she has taken a vigorous 
part in Chinese reform movements, has written for 
English and Chinese periodicals, and has frequently 
turned in to clean up some of the dark spots in her 
own city. When funds for her hospital ran out, she 
took work in a government institution until she had 
received enough to put the Nanchang hospital back 
on its feet. When she wants something done, and 
done quickly, she summons the provincial officials, 
who come without delay, and agree without delay 
to do whatever she asks. She is a positive, uncom¬ 
promising person, who gets things done. Certain 
famous women who might be named from past his¬ 
tory must have been much the same. 

China’s new women have given themselves un¬ 
sparingly to all sorts of reform movements. They 
have led in the agitation against foot-binding. They 
have fought the opium evil relentlessly. They have 
organized a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 
with Chinese officers, and are agitating against the 
slowly growing liquor evil. They will undertake 
[ 100 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


without misgiving great campaigns, in centers like 
Peking, to teach the masses how to have hygienic 
home conditions, with demonstration centers in which 
totally illiterate women can be shown what their 
homes should be. In the movements toward reform 
in the industrial realm it has not been accidental that 
the Young Women’s Christian Association should 
have taken a leading part. 

During the winter of 1922-23 the girls in that 
remarkable Christian school, Ginling College, Nan¬ 
king, were studying the application of Christianity 
to social conditions. Soon they began to show signs 
of restlessness, which culminated in the decision that 
the theories learned in the classroom should be put 
into immediate practice. Accordingly, negotiations 
were entered into with the ricksha-pullers of the 
city, as a result of which a scale of rates was worked 
out which was accepted by the men as fair. This 
scale has been made public throughout Nanking, and 
serves to protect one of the most pitiful groups of 
toilers of that city. 

Within the last year or two what might be called 
China’s feminist movement has begun to take con¬ 
crete form. Soon after the revolution of 1911 there 
were sporadic outbreaks in favor of equal suffrage, 
but nothing permanent appeared at that time. Now, 
however, there are associations for the securing of 
suffrage and of equal rights in ten provinces. 

The Woman Suffrage Association has announced 
this platform: 


[ 101 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


1. For the purpose of protecting woman’s rights, all the arti¬ 
cles in the constitution partial to men should be abolished. 

2. In order to secure economic independence for women, the 
limiting of inheritance rights to men should be abolished. 

3. In demanding equality of opportunity in education, the 
old system of giving women a limited education adapted only 
to domestic affairs should be abolished. 

The Woman’s Rights League calls for these 
things: 

1. All educational institutions shall be open to women. 

2. Women shall have the same constitutional rights as men. 

3. The relation between man and wife, parents and children, 
rights of inheritance, property and conduct laws shall be based 
upon the principle of equality. 

4. Marriage laws based upon equality between men and 
women shall be enacted. 

5. For the protection of girls the “age of consent” shall be 
incorporated in the criminal law, and a law shall be enacted 
whereby the taking of concubines shall be considered as bigamy. 

6. Licensed prostitution, the slave trade, and foot-binding 
shall be prohibited. 

7. Protective labor legislation based upon the principle of 
“equal pay for equal work” and “protection of motherhood” 
shall be enacted. 

Many forms of feminism are being agitated in 
the growing number of papers that cater to the 
women of China. Two years ago the citizens of 
Tientsin and Peking were roused when they read 
this advertisement in one of the daily papers: 

“In view of the national chaos and social dis¬ 
order, it is necessary for a modern Chinese girl to 
[ 102 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


acquire the highest education possible in order to 
be able to face the problem of life with full equip¬ 
ment. As for me, my education has been rather 
limited and my desire to prosecute further studies 
is above the boiling point. Several times I have 
asked my father to grant my wish. Unfortunately, 
my parents are so conservative that they have de¬ 
clined to consider my request favorably. Under 
these circumstances I cannot but leave my dear ones 
in order to realize my ambitious aim. From De¬ 
cember 3, 1921, I have severed all my connection 
with my family.” 

The new-style editor saw a chance for a feature 
in this advertisement and invited the opinions of 
readers as to whether or not the girl had been jus¬ 
tified in publishing such a manifesto. A flood of 
letters poured in, so strongly in favor of the girl 
that at last her father, a well-known scholar of the 
old school, agreed to compromise, using the editor 
as mediator. The treaty of peace, as finally pub¬ 
lished, contained these stipulations: 

1. The parents promised to support the girl and her sister in 
school. 

2. In case the girls felt it wise to go to a boarding-school, the 
parents promised to make no objections. 

3- The daughters were to be free to choose their own courses 
of study. 

4. The daughters were to be allowed to buy and read any 
decent books, magazines, and newspapers. 

5. The daughters were to have freedom of correspondence, 
but were to report their movements to their parents. 

[103] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


6. The parents were to promise to support their daughters in 
case they wished to study abroad. 

7. The girls were not to be betrothed before the age of 
twenty-five. If they should then have their own views on matri¬ 
mony, they were to be free to lay them before their parents. 
There should be no betrothal without consent of the girls. 

Here, in a newspaper advertisement and its after- 
math, is something of a sketch of new China’s new 
woman. Where has she come from? She is, of 
course, a part of this inner revolution that is re¬ 
making so much of Chinese life. But she has an¬ 
tecedents of her own. 

China’s history contains scattered stories of sev¬ 
eral women who achieved careers for themselves, 
notably the great soldier, Mu-lan. But it is prob¬ 
able that the emancipation of China’s women had a 
religious origin when first Buddhist convents were 
set up, and hundreds of devotees broke family ties 
to enter sanctuaries. However, the life of a Bud¬ 
dhist nun is largely a life of segregation and absti¬ 
nence. It was in Christian religious work that the 
woman of China found her first real opportunity 
for active freedom. 

No sooner did women as missionaries bring their 
living object-lesson to the East than they found it 
necessary to secure Chinese women as their helpers. 
These in many cases had to fight the battle for 
women’s rights before they could enter upon their 
service. The old-fashioned Bible woman, with her 
cheap clothes, her lack of education, and her limited 
[ 104 ] 


CHINA’S NEW WOMEN 


outlook, may not have seemed to some a romantic 
figure, but she was the pioneer in whose footsteps 
walk all the emancipated women of modern China. 

Chinese women still look overseas for inspiration 
in their struggle toward a new day. Not long ago 
a Chinese, Mrs. H. C. Mei, was addressing a meet¬ 
ing in Shanghai, telling of the changed outlook of 
the women of her country. 

“It is not flattery to say that Chinese women look 
for feminist ideals and inspiration from America,” 
she said. “From American missionaries Chinese 
girls first imbibed the sense of human personality 
which their men-folk for ages past had all but de¬ 
nied them. From American schools they learned the 
comforting strength of an independent mind and the 
sweetness of real freedom; from American homes 
they drank in the \yholesome atmosphere of domes¬ 
tic harmony with which they are making normal the 
Chinese household; from the high-spirited and 
achieving American women they have received the 
lesson of self-respecting and self-reliant character, 
whether it be in taking up a professional career, or 
entering the ranks of bread-winners, or home-build¬ 
ing” 

Of course, all the two hundred million women of 
China are not like the women spoken of in this 
chapter. But the number is increasing, and the day 
is on the way when the whole vast lump will be 
leavened. 


[105] 


VI 

BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 

It was about half-past three on one of those cold, 
damp mornings that Shanghai knows so well in early 
spring. The missionary rolled over again in bed, 
digging his ears down into the pillows, trying to 
escape the cries from outside his window. He knew 
only too well what the wailings meant, for he had 
heard many like them before. Some child was be¬ 
ing driven to work in a factory against her will. 
Soon she would be gone, and then sleep would be 
possible. And, anyway, what could the missionary 
possibly do by interfering? 

“Let me die 5 kill me if you like; I won’t go!” 
came in screams through the window, followed by 
the thud of belaboring hands, more groans, and the 
shrill curses of a woman. 

Finally, the missionary could stand it no longer. 
Slipping into a robe, he hurried down to the back 
gate. It was still so dark that he had to be guided 
by the sounds, and when he reached the source of 
all the commotion he had to touch the arm of the 
woman before she realized that anyone was near. 

The child, a little girl who did not look more than 
eight, but who was probably nearer ten, was lying 
on the wet, muddy cobbles, moaning hysterically. 
Suddenly she discovered that someone else was near 
—a foreigner. She had heard stories of the dread- 
[ 106 ] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 

ful things these red-haired beings did to little girls, 
and before the woman could put a detaining hand on 
her, she had vanished in the dark. 

The woman, evidently a country woman from 
north of the river, with a face that was not un¬ 
pleasant in spite of the job that she had just been 
engaged in, started to follow, but the missionary 
demanded that she stay. Her feet were bare, and 
she wore nothing but a loose jacket and short 
trousers. Although it was a cold night, her face 
was streaming with perspiration from her recent 
efforts. 

“Is it necessary to punish the child like that?” the 
missionary asked. 

“Yes j she won’t go to work.” 

“But isn’t she too young to work, especially at this 
time of the night? Where is her father?” 

“She has none.” 

“Then can’t you support her yourself? Surely 
you know it is bad for her to work in a factory at 
this age.” 

“I can’t support her and myself, too.” 

“How much do you get?” 

“Twenty cents small money (about ten cents in 
American currency), and with the price of rice what 
it is now, that is hardly enough to feed one mouth.” 

“How much does the girl get?” 

“Ten cents. With what we both earn, we have 
barely enough to eat. If she loses a day, we go 
hungry.” 


[107] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


“What time do you have to be at the factory?” 

“Four o’clock, and leave about seven in the eve¬ 
ning.” 

“You mean that that child has to work fifteen 
hours a day?” 

“Yes, about that.” 

“Where do you live?” 

“Over there,” and she waved toward the village 
of mud and thatched huts, a stone’s throw distant, 
many of them not high enough for a man to stand 
upright in, and most of them consisting of a single 
small room. Only a couple of months before this 
whole little settlement had burned. But in three 
days’ time it had been rebuilt. 

“Where do you work?” 

“In a cigarette factory over there,” and the woman 
pointed in the opposite direction. 

“What is the name of the factory?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Well, if you will wait for me here while I get 
dressed, I will pay your wages for the day, for I 
want to find out more about this factory where you 
work.” 

But when the missionary returned, the woman had 
lost courage and disappeared. 

And that is only one case of thousands more or 
less similar, though fortunately there are really not 
many mills in China that run one shift from fifteen 
to sixteen hours a day. But the plight of the little 
girl, brought from her home on the farm-lands 
[ 108 ] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


north of the Yangtze to a cigarette factory in the 
great city, is symptomatic of the shift that is, 
with gathering force, beginning to affect all China’s 
people. 

For more than forty centuries most of China’s 
people have been farmers. And what fine farmers 
they have been! On their little plots of land, sel¬ 
dom more than a third of an acre in size, they have 
raised three and four crops a year in rotation for 
thousands of years. Such an authority as Professor 
King, of the University of Wisconsin, tells us that 
they have produced the highest yield per acre of 
any farmers in the world. We Westerners, under 
whose hands rich land is often exhausted after a 
century, should ponder these facts before we begin 
to look down upon the Chinese farmer, despite his 
use of primitive tools. 

China is still predominantly agricultural, and will 
so remain for a century to come. It is estimated 
that eighty-five per cent of her people are still 
farmers, and when you speak of Chinese industry, 
you must always have these sturdy men of the soil 
in mind. That is why so much of the most effective 
missionary work today deals with the aiding of the 
farmers. 

But the shift from the land to the machine, from 
the country to the city, has begun, and it will hardly 
cease until China, with her enormous resources, has 
become one of the great manufacturing nations. Just 
how many Chinese are now engaged in factory in- 
[109] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


dustry it is impossible to estimate. In the city of 
Shanghai, the industrial capital, there are about 
550,000 workers, and the numbers in the rest of the 
country would probably bring the total above the 
two-million mark. More impressive than any such 
figures is the growth of whole industrial cities. 

Shanghai is a case in point. We have grown ac¬ 
customed to thinking of Shanghai, with its popula¬ 
tion of more than a million, as one of the world’s 
great cities. A recent writer has said that, with its 
situation at the mouth of the world’s most populous 
watershed, Shanghai is bound to become the largest 
city on the globe. Many Americans, with all their 
worship of speed, hardly realize that the growth of 
Shanghai has been as remarkable as that of Chicago. 
When the first settlers built their fort at what is 
now Chicago, they were a few years ahead of the 
first traders who settled near the wretched little fish¬ 
ing village that was then Shanghai. But modern 
industry, as it has made its slow progress in China, 
has forced the population of this city, located where 
the great river flows into the sea, ever upward. And 
now that the industrial development is on in earnest, 
the city is expanding like a caliph’s dream. 

Should a traveler who was last in China a decade 
ago make the night trip by rail from Shanghai to 
Nanking today, he might rub his eyes as the train 
stopped in a station a few miles west of Soochow. 
For beyond the station he would see the most mod¬ 
ern type of street lights illuminating the roadway, 
[HO] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


and beyond there would rise, story upon story, the 
yellow squares of factory windows. Ten years ago 
a self-respecting train would scarcely deign to whistle 
as it rushed through the little village here 5 today 
the traveler would be looking upon the great in¬ 
dustrial city of Wusih. 

Or the same traveler might open a paper and see 
there an advertisement written in the same sort of 
language that would be employed by an American 
booster club: “Come to Nantungchow, China’s model 
city!” And if the appeal proved strong enough to 
take him up the river to the place where a former 
high official, Mr. Chang Chien, has brought reality 
to his dreams, he would find a widespreading mu¬ 
nicipality, with broad streets, fine buildings, and 
varied industries, illustrating the possibilities of a 
new kind of prosperity to all the lower Yangtze 
valley. 

“When I first came to Tsinan,” a resident of the 
capital of Shantung Province said not long ago, 
“the only factory chimney in the city was that of 
the German-built electric-light plant. Now there 
are more than thirty stacks belching forth soot.” 

A recent estimate puts the number of modern fac¬ 
tories in China at fourteen hundred, and there are 
thousands more of a semi-modern type. Besides 
these, there are the innumerable places, often no bet¬ 
ter than hovels, where some of China’s most char¬ 
acteristic products are manufactured. 

In Nanking, for example, there are whole streets 

[HI] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


given over to the weaving of silks and satins. The 
looms are set up in courtyards and rooms of the 
little houses. Late at night you may hear their 
wooden clacking, and I never was able to get up 
before that noise had started in the morning. The 
rooms are very dark. They have dirt floors. Chil¬ 
dren, dogs, and sometimes a pig or so, wander about. 
But in some way these weavers manage to produce 
bolts of the most delicate pink and green and blue 
silks, with exquisite designs woven into them, and 
without the semblance of a spot appearing. 

The commercial attache of the United States in 
China has reported that the Westernized industries 
of the country already include cotton-mills, silk- 
mills, oil-mills, woolen-mills, sawmills, paper-mills, 
flour-mills, ship-building works, knitting works, 
steel works, printing works, smelting-works, water 
works, glass works, brick works, canneries, net fac¬ 
tories, match factories, railway shops, sugar fac¬ 
tories, cigarette factories, newspapers, egg-drying 
factories, furniture factories, chinaware and porcelain 
factories, distilleries, breweries, arsenals, and num¬ 
berless smaller manufacturing enterprises. The cot¬ 
ton- and silk-mills form the backbone of the new 
industrial order. Some sense of the rate of growth 
may be caught from the knowledge that, between 
1919 and 1922, the number of cotton-mills jumped 
from 49 to 102. Forty-six per cent of these are 
owned by foreign capital. 

This rapid growth of a Westernized industry has 

[ 112 ] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


led to an increase of more than six hundred per cent 
in the imports and exports of China since the open¬ 
ing of this century! No wonder that other nations, 
eager to secure wealth for their people by the con¬ 
trol of world markets, see in China a great prize to 
be grasped at almost any price. 

Much of the industry that is growing up in the 
East today is a direct importation from the West. 
This is, of course, true of all the factories that de¬ 
pend upon power looms or similar machinery. It is 
frequently true of other forms of labor that, on 
the surface, appear indigenous. The ricksha-puller, 
for instance, is in a form of work that takes a hideous 
toll of human life. We are likely to think of the 
ricksha as distinctively Oriental. But the truth is 
that the two-wheeled, man-pulled buggy was in¬ 
vented by a missionary who found wheelbarrows too 
slow a method of transportation. 

Silk weaving was one of the great industries of 
China two thousand years ago. We still think of 
it as distinctly Chinese, and so it is. But a few 
years ago it appeared that China’s silk industry must 
disappear before the competition of the silkworms 
of Japan and other countries. The industry is not 
yet back to its proper place, but it is making long 
strides toward recovery. And this largely because 
mission schools, notably the University of Nanking, 
working in cooperation with the Department of 
Agriculture of the United States, have stepped in to 
determine scientifically what has been the matter 
[113] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


with China’s silkworms, and to produce a breed that 
would meet the competition of the rest of the 
world. 

Much the same thing has been done by the same 
school to make possible the cultivation of cotton. 
The profitable production of the raw materials upon 
which China’s most rapidly developing industries 
depend, therefore, is due to the contribution of the 
West through the mission school. 

Yet the growth of a new industry has not been 
wholly the result of Western initiative. In speak¬ 
ing before the Bankers’ Club in New York City a 
few years ago, Mr. B. L. Putnam Weale, the British 
writer, told of the metamorphosis that had come to 
a shop located within a stone’s throw of his home 
in Peking. The story epitomizes the way in which 
Chinese are entering into new fields of industry. 
Until three or four years ago this shop confined its 
attention to the repair of pots and kettles. One day 
a Ford that had been in collision with a telegraph 
post was brought to the shop for minor repairs and, 
out of the success of that adventure, an automobile 
garage blossomed forth. Not more than a year later 
a big English steam-roller panted up to the door 
in the last stages of exhaustion. The proprietor and 
his employees devoted a day to studying the mon¬ 
ster. At the end of that time they went to work 
and, with cold chisel and main strength, removed 
the boiler and most of the interior parts of the roller. 
For forty-eight days the work never stopped by day 
[114] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


or night. Before it was finished, practically all of 
the community had borne a hand in it. But, at the 
end of that time, the steam-roller, repaired and 
repainted, lumbered off in triumph. The old pot 
and kettle shop had climbed one rung higher. 

If you will let your imagination play with an 
incident like this for a few minutes, and then remem¬ 
ber that, in similar ways, it can be multiplied hun¬ 
dreds of times in other parts of China, you will see 
that, in this under-the-surface change of which we 
have been talking, this industrial shift may prove as 
important as any other part of China’s real revolu¬ 
tion. 

When the United States entered the nineteenth 
century it was ninety per cent agricultural. In 1910 
only thirty-three per cent of its people lived on the 
farm. When China entered the twentieth century 
it was ninety per cent agricultural. If a shift from 
the farm to the factory involving only a third of 
these takes place during the century (a conservative 
forecast), more than the entire present population of 
the United States will be affected. 

When, at the beginning of the last century, Eng¬ 
land made the shift from the land to the machine, 
it brought years of disorder from which it seemed 
at times as though international anarchy might re¬ 
sult. If that were true in conservative and con¬ 
stricted England, with the difficult communications 
of that day, what will be the effect of such a shift 
on the part of China’s vast and undisciplined masses.? 
[ 115 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


Can you change the industrial order in terms of con¬ 
tinents without having continental upheavals? 

The answer to that question largely depends, of 
course, upon the manner in which the change takes 
place. And it is here that the situation in a country 
like China should cause the most grave alarm. It 
is too easy for the superficial traveler, because he 
sees the black smoke belching from the factory chim¬ 
neys of these cities of the East, to go home and 
assure the Kiwanis Club or the Rotary Club or the 
Chamber of Commerce that “these heathen nations 
are actually being civilized, by George! ” But there 
is more involved here than the smoke in the chim¬ 
ney or the product in the packing-room, or the rise 
in imports and exports. There is a great human 
problem and a great moral problem, with an actual 
menace to future world unity. At the foot of the 
smokestacks of China the Christian may find a tre¬ 
mendous challenge to his faith. 

For what kind of labor is it that tends the ma¬ 
chines in these new industrial centers of the Orient? 
What sort of wages are being paid these people as 
they desert the little farm-holdings that have nur¬ 
tured their ancestors for centuries? Under what 
conditions are these recruits to the machine forced 
to work? Will this industry eventually bless or 
curse? 

Mr. Sherwood Eddy was in China in 1923, and 
renders vivid testimony to conditions as he saw them. 

“One of the first plants visited in a leading indus- 
[116] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


trial center was a match factory, which is said to be 
the best of its kind in that city,” he says. “We 
found there eleven hundred employees, for the most 
part boys from nine to fifteen years of age, working 
from 4 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., with a few minutes of 
intermission at noon. They work on an average fif¬ 
teen hours a day, seven days a week, with no Sunday 
of rest. The boys receive from six to ten cents, and 
the men about twenty-five cents a day. The poison¬ 
ous fumes of phosphorus and sulphur and the dust 
from the other chemicals burned our lungs even in 
the short half hour we were in the factory. Eighty 
men and boys in this plant have to visit the hospital 
each day for treatment. Many suffer from ‘phossy 
jaw,’ where the bones of the face decay on account 
of the cheap grade of phosphorus. This could be 
avoided if somewhat more expensive chemicals were 
used, but it would cut down the profits, which are 
said to be very high. 

“We next visited a Chinese rug factory making 
the most beautiful ‘Persian’ rugs for use in the 
homes of millionaires in America and Europe. But 
who are making these rugs? Twelve hundred boys 
and young men, from nine to twenty-five years of 
age, are here employed. The foremen receive $8, 
while other men average $4.50 a month and their 
food. Men and boys are working on an average of 
sixteen hours a day, from 5:30 a.m to 10 p.m. 

The majority of the boys serve as apprentices for 
a period of three years and receive no fay whatever 

[117] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


but only get their food. This ‘apprenticeship 5 is 
only a blind alley. After the boys serve three years 
there is no future for them in the business. 1 When 
they are graduated from their apprenticeship, they 
can become ricksha coolies and earn on an average 
fifteen cents a day. The fifty thousand ricksha 
pullers in Peking average less than this amount. 
After five years of this work they are usually broken 
in health and are then useless. The ricksha coolie 
who brought me home last night was endeavoring to 
support a family of four upon his small earnings. 
If he has no work for a day, he must go without 
food. 

“The third plant visited was a Chinese tannery 
run by a Christian. The conditions here are said to 
be the best of all the smaller factories in the city. 
The usual sixteen hours 5 work a day is reduced by 
this Christian to ten. Men and boys earn from 
$5.50to$8.50a month. Apprentices sleep in a loft 
above the shop, and in addition to their food and 
clothes, receive thirty-five cents a month during the 
first year. The second year they are paid a dollar 
a month, and the third year nearly four dollars a 
month or thirteen cents a day. The industrial de¬ 
partment of the Y.M.C.A. is permitted to put on 
a program of welfare work, athletics, and games foi 
the workers. It was most touching to see the faces 
of these boys light up with gratitude when they saw 

1 This is so because the factory proprietor hires more ap¬ 
prentices to take the places of those to whom wages would have 
to be paid.—P. H. 

[118] 



FORTY PER CENT OF THE WORKERS IN THE COTTON AND SILK MILLS OF SHANGHAI 

ARE CHILDREN. 



■ 





m 


WHERE EAST AND WEST MEET ON THE HANKOW WATER-FRONT. 













BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


the industrial secretary of the Y.M.C.A. enter the 
shop. He knows them personally and is bringing a 
ray of light into the hearts of hundreds of these 
weary little toilers. 

“The fourth factory was a Chinese weaving es¬ 
tablishment making cloth upon primitive looms. At 
present there are 15,000 boys in the city working 
on these looms. In normal times there are 25,000 
employed, but many are now out of w r ork. The 
wages paid to the men average $4.50 a month, or 
about fifteen cents a day. The workers average about 
eighteen hours a day, from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m, work¬ 
ing seven days a week. The majority of the boys 
are apprentices who receive no wage whatever, but 
only their food.” 

Equally grim are the reports from other indus¬ 
tries. A friend of mine visited the Pinghsiang col¬ 
liery in Kiangsi Province last year. After some 
hesitation the manager allowed him to go with one 
shift of miners two miles underground, where he 
found men, stark naked, streaming with sweat, pick¬ 
ing away at the open coal seam. From this suffo¬ 
cating gallery the men were carried back to the cold 
air of the upper levels at 4:30 o’clock in the morning. 

All things considered, the conditions in this mine 
were superior to those to be found in many similar 
industries in China. Yet the men felt that they 
were being crushed by an inexorable industrial ma¬ 
chine. As the driver of the engine that was to carry 
the little party to the surface took a Bible, he said: 
[119] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


“Sir, you are bringing us the Christian gospel, which 
is very good. But, sir, the condition of the men 
in the mines is very bitter.” 

“It is better since you struck, isn’t it?” 

“Yes, they have quit beating the men, but we work 
long hours and get small pay.” 

“Don’t you get thirty cents a day and your board 
and lodging?” 

“No,” replied the engine-driver. “My pay is now 
twenty-eight cents. I get one meal from the com¬ 
pany, but I have my family here and rent my own 
house. Some of the men get less and work more. 
These men you have just seen digging will work 
until 4.30 tomorrow morning. They get one meal 
served them in here, eat when they go out and just 
before they come in. They are fed and housed by 
the company, which pays them besides fifteen cents 
a day. Some really work as much as fifteen hours; 
and when you add an hour for meals and eight for 
sleep, there is nothing else in life. Even on a twelve- 
hour shift one has little time or energy left. 

“Most of us have been here many years. I came 
soon after the mines opened. Very few new toilers 
have come in recent years. Three thousand men 
are toiling at these underground tasks, and our lot 
is bitter and hopeless. Twice a month we have a rest 
day, but we often lose that by a change of shifts, 
when the day workers change with the night workers. 
You see why we can’t often go to the church where 
they preach the good gospel you bring.” 

[ 120 ] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


It is in the mills that laboring conditions are to 
be seen at their worst. In fact, so bad are these con¬ 
ditions that in many of the mills they cannot be seen. 
Strict orders have debarred outsiders from passing 
the gates, so that there can be no first-hand report 
of the way in which thousands of mere children have 
to stand through the long nights, slaves of the great 
machines. 

Yet if you will take your stand in Yangtsepoo 
Road in Shanghai shortly before half-past five any 
evening, you will see what sort of human material 
it is that is being fed into this new industrial order. 
At your back, stretching from the street to the river 
bank, are the great mills, many of them concrete- 
and-steel structures. Across the road are countless 
Chinese shops and tea-houses. Up and down the 
street clatter tram-cars and automobiles. Rickshas 
jog by. And in and out of this ceaseless traffic 
weave long lines of wheelbarrows, each barrow 
freighted with the workers who are to go on duty 
at 5:30 and remain there until the same time to¬ 
morrow morning. 

I have never seen one of these wheelbarrows that 
bore fewer than six workers at that time of day. 
Eight is more common, and ten might be called the 
standard load. Every so often a barrow will pass 
bearing workers so young that fourteen of them can 
be wheeled by a single coolie. 

That is the sort of a foundation upon which men, 
in their desire for quick and high profits, are trying 
[ 121 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


to build China’s new industrial life. It has been 
stated that, taking into consideration all the indus¬ 
tries in modern China, including those that must use 
nothing but mature male labor, the workers are fif¬ 
teen per cent women and twenty per cent children 
under fourteen years of age! And a careful inves¬ 
tigation of the cotton- and silk-mills of Shanghai 
disclosed the fact that forty per cent of the workers 
are women and forty per cent children. 

A group of interested Christians tried to give a 
Christmas party to these silk-mill girls of Shanghai 
a few years ago. One hundred and twenty of them 
came—one hundred and twenty morsels of dismal 
humanity. Most of them had bound feet, and the 
tips of their fingers were white from constant dip¬ 
ping into the hot water in which the cocoons are 
handled. These children ranged from six to twelve 
years of age, and were probably familiar with the 
mills from their earliest days, for mothers fre¬ 
quently bring their babies and place them among the 
piles of cocoons between feedings. Then when the 
child is old enough, it is taught to sort the cocoons 
and pull off the waste, and so it spends the long days, 
sitting on a little stool in the dark, dusty, unheated 
room, picking endlessly away. 

The youngsters at this Christmas party were curi¬ 
ous as to what was in store for them. But the best 
efforts of the most accomplished recreational leaders 
of the city could do nothing to arouse them. They 
had been utterly beaten down by the monotony of 
[ 122 ] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


the factory. Their young strength had been mort¬ 
gaged even before they were born. 

Even after they have been worked thus hard, these 
mill-hands frequently receive only a pittance. Wages 
have been slowly forced up in China since the close 
of the World War (as in other countries, they have 
not kept pace with the rise in living costs), but still 
today, in the most highly paid labor center in China, 
Shanghai, skilled women workers in the silk-mills 
receive but from thirty-six to forty cents a day, gold; 
unskilled women workers but from twenty-eight to 
thirty-five cents a day; and girls but from fifteen 
to twenty cents a day. And it is estimated that more 
than seventy per cent of all the workers in the 
country are working the seven-day week. 

This exploitation is reaching out from the mills 
to cast its blight upon the homes around the mills. 
A system of sweatshop labor is coming into exist¬ 
ence that bids fair to go far toward the undermining 
of Chinese village life. 

A group of Christians wanted to establish a school 
for the children of workers. Having secured a loca¬ 
tion and a teacher, they set out to gather a constitu¬ 
ency. They went to a little group of shacks near 
a factory center, expecting to find the children eager 
to attend the new school while their parents were 
at work. The children were eager enough, but not 
many of them could enrol in the school. For these 
were the conditions in the eight houses that made up 
that little village: 


[ 123 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


In the first there was only one boy. He was 
thirteen years old and worked in an iron-foundry. 

In the second, two little girls and a woman were 
found making match-boxes. Each girl made two 
thousand a day, and the woman from four to five 
thousand. They were paid four cents (American 
money) for every thousand boxes finished. 

In the third house they were told that the three 
girls, seven and eight years old, began work in a 
thread factory at 6 a.m. daily. They worked twelve 
hours and earned from ten to fifteen cents a day. 

In the fourth house the children were making a 
thousand match-boxes a day. 

In the fifth house a boy of seven and a girl of 
fourteen were working in the thread factory. Their 
top limit of pay was twenty cents a day. 

In the sixth house there were two girls, each five 
years old. But they could not go to school, for they 
were learning a trade. They received no pay dur¬ 
ing their apprenticeship. 

In the seventh house a seventeen-year-old girl 
was making five thousand matches in a twelve-hour 
day. 

In the eighth house there was a girl who worked 
in a cigarette factory, packing boxes. Her wages 
were a cent for every fifty boxes packed. In the 
same factory she said that boys and girls five and 
six years of age were working a twelve-hour day. 
A third of the force was working eighteen hours. 

Naturally, an industry conducted under such con- 

[ 124 ] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


ditions expects to pile up enormous profits. To our 
shame be it said that many of the worst offenders 
have been companies formed by investors from 
Christian lands. The condition of one of these com¬ 
panies was thus reported in a trade journal: 

“The profits of the - factory again surpass 

$1,000,000. To those who bestow thought on the 
progress of textile industries in China, the following 
particulars concerning this concern may be of inter¬ 
est. The company was started in 1904 with a paid- 
up capital of $600,000, divided into 6,000 shares of 
$100 each. The capital was increased to $900,000 
in 1916. . . . For the past two years it has been 
running night and day without intermission. . . . 
The working hours are from 5:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., 
and from 5:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m., respectively. No 
meals are supplied by the factory. Most of the cot¬ 
ton is produced locally. ... It will be seen that the 
company is in an exceptionally favorable position. 
With the raw product at its door, an abundant and 
absurdly cheap labor supply to draw on, and no 
vexatious factory laws to observe, it is not surprising 
that its annual profits should have exceeded its total 
capital on at least three occasions.” 

No, it is not surprising. Neither is it surprising 
that even the Chinese, tormented by hunger as they 
are, are beginning to rebel against such ruthless ex¬ 
ploitation. A labor movement has sprung into be¬ 
ing within the last few months that is putting a new 
complexion on the industrial situation in China. For 
[125] 



CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


centuries China has had her guilds. But these have 
been nothing more than associations of employers. 
Now she has her labor-unions of employees, and 
already they are showing power. 

It was in the spring of 1922 that the laboring 
man first began to realize his own strength in China. 
Sailors on foreign-owned ships struck in the harbor 
of Hongkong. For a time the companies laughed 
at the threat, thinking it would be easy to fill the 
vacant places. But one ship after another was tied 
at anchor until there were finally more than 250,000 
tons of shipping lying idle. At last the shipping 
companies gave in. 

The effect was immediate up and down the China 
coast. Labor-unions came into being in all the port 
cities. In Shanghai, for example, more than sixty 
such unions were formed within a month after the 
close of the Hongkong strike. These embraced all 
sorts of crafts. In Canton and Chaochow, one of 
its main suburbs, there were more than fifty strikes 
within the next nine months, and nine tenths of them, 
because of public support, were successful. It is 
even reported that as far inland as the province of 
Hunan, when the soldiers attempted to run trains 
on the northern section of the Canton-Wuchang 
railway, strikers threw their bodies on the tracks 
until more than a hundred had been killed or in¬ 
jured, thus bringing the railway to an effective 
standstill. 

The springing up of this labor movement, with 
[126] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


the publication of drastic lists of demands, moved 
the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, early 
in 1923, to promulgate a list of regulations for the 
control of factory labor. To be sure, these regula¬ 
tions are only on paper, and will never be enforced 
by the present feeble government. But there is 
some value in having them on paper, as a recognized 
standard toward which to work. 

There are twenty-eight articles in the list of gov¬ 
ernment labor regulations. The employment of 
boys under the age of ten and of girls under twelve 
is forbidden. Child labor is defined as that done 
by boys of less than seventeen and girls less than 
eighteen, and is not to exceed eight hours a day. 
Adult labor is not to exceed ten hours a day. There 
shall be no child labor at night. Educational facili¬ 
ties are to be offered all workers, especially children, 
and there is provision for care and compensation for 
injured and sick workers. Women are to be ade¬ 
quately cared for before, during, and after child¬ 
birth. 

It takes no prophet to see that the industrial situa¬ 
tion as it has been developing up to this time in 
China has been leading toward the same sort of eco¬ 
nomic warfare as the West has known. The pursuit 
of profits at whatever cost in human life has been 
making the workers more and more bitter, and the 
organization of labor-unions has been but the first 
step in an endless class warfare. Were there no 
other elements in the situation than those already 
[127] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


mentioned, the industrial side of China’s inner 
change would be as bitter and exhausting an affair 
as any of the industrial disputes that have tormented 
England and America. 

Fortunately, the Christian forces have swung into 
action in this field in a way that gives a promise 
of better days in the near future. Warned by the 
experience of the West, the Church has been able 
to point out the need for industrial justice if there 
is to be any peace within the nation. The contribu¬ 
tion of the Church really began to make itself felt 
a few years ago when Miss Zung Wei Tsung, a sec¬ 
retary of the Young Women’s Christian Association, 
began to conduct a column in the leading Chinese 
daily of Shanghai, setting forth conditions in the 
mills of that city. It was the first time that the sit¬ 
uation had been forced upon the attention of the city 
in a way that could not be avoided. 

The gathering of six hundred students from 
thirty-seven nations in the convention of the World’s 
Student Christian Federation at Peking, early in 
1922, gave the movement a further impetus. For 
these students laid down as their creed, “The con¬ 
struction of our ideal society is based on the spirit 
and teachings of Jesus Christ, and we therefore be¬ 
lieve in: 

1. The absolute sacred value of the individual. 

2. Love as the basis of human fellowship. 

3. Mutual service as the means of human prog¬ 
ress.” 


[ 128 ] 


BENEATH THE SMOKESTACKS 


And these students then went ahead to present a pro¬ 
gram for industrial democracy that struck hard at 
the sort of abuses that are rampant in China. 

It remained for the National Christian Confer¬ 
ence of 1922 to bring the matter to head. Here 
1,189 delegates, representing all parts of the Church 
in China, picked this as one of the two subjects for 
action by the entire conference—regulation of the 
opium traffic was the other—and, with but one dis¬ 
senting voice, adopted a progressive industrial policy 
as the embodiment of Christian ideals, and called 
for the immediate acceptance by all industries of 
three rules: 

1. No employment of children under twelve 
years of age. 

2. One day’s rest in seven. 

3. The safeguarding of the health of the worker 
through the limitation of working hours, improve¬ 
ment of working conditions, and installation of 
safety devices. 

In the time that has passed since this standard 
was adopted, the Christians have gone about organ¬ 
izing groups in almost all China’s industrial centers 
that will press to see it put into practice. In two 
important cities, Peking and Cheefoo, the Chinese 
Chambers of Commerce have been induced to adopt 
the Christian standard. (The victory in Cheefoo 
may be of peculiar interest to some American ladies, 
for it is there that most of the world’s hair-nets 
are manufactured.) Advance legislation has been 
[129] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


passed in Hongkong. The regulations of the gov¬ 
ernment have already been mentioned. 

And what does it all mean? Surely it means that 
China is facing an entirely new sort of life. With 
her immense resources, both in man-power and in 
the raw materials that the world so needs, she is 
bound to become, within a century, one of the great 
manufacturing nations. This change has already be¬ 
gun, and in a manner to warn of trouble not far off. 
But some have seen the warnings, and a bettering 
of laboring conditions is already apparent. One 
great agency for this improvement is the Christian 
Church. In fact, to many grateful Chinese the 
Church seems to have been the agency that has 
sounded the alarm and pointed to a safer path of 
development. To the workers of -the new China, 
therefore, the Church can speak with an authority 
beyond that known in many other lands. 


[ 130 ] 


VII 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 

Two students who had studied in America were 
walking away from the service conducted for Eng¬ 
lish-speaking Chinese on Sunday afternoons in the 
Y.M.C.A. at Shanghai. 

“I haven’t seen you here for some time, Mr. 
Tang,” one greeted the other. 

“No, Dr. Loj for this is the first time I have been 
at the meeting for a good many months.” 

“Have you been out of town?” 

“No, Pm in business here. The truth is that I 
have rather lost interest in this sort of thing.” 

“Pm sorry to hear you say that. I had understood 
that you were active in Christian work.” 

“There was a time,” Mr. Tang said slowly, “when 
I was active. You know that I was educated in a 
mission school. While there, I acted as one of the 
officers of the student Y.M.C.A. Then I won a 
scholarship for study abroad, which gave me three 
years of postgraduate work in America. 

“During my first year in America I attended the 
usual religious services at college. I was too busy 
trying to find my place in the unfamiliar life of an 
American campus to go outside much. And, in the 
rush of classes, questions connected with religion 
hardly entered my mind. 

“Then came my first vacation period, when I 

[131] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


started out to see some of the actual processes of 
American industry. I lived in four American cities 
that summer, and I had some unpleasant experiences 
while hunting lodgings and in other ways, I can 
tell you.” 

“Yes, I know what you mean,” answered Dr. Lo, 
quietly. 

“There’s not much Christian brotherhood in that 
sort of thing, is there? Perhaps I shouldn’t have 
been so upset by it, but—well, I was. 

“Then I went back to college, and that fall I dis¬ 
covered that some of my professors and a great num¬ 
ber of my fellow students had very little interest 
in religion. It wasn’t just a lack of interest in the 
particular religion that I had known as Christianity. 
It was a lack of interest in any religion. Some of 
the students said openly what I felt that many of 
them believed, that religion was just a form of old- 
fashioned foolishness, and not a part of the life of 
a scientific age. 

“I remember an argument that I had about then 
with an American student. I had asked him some 
question about Christianity in his country, and he 
seemed amazed that I should have any interest in 
the subject. 

“ Why worry about that?’ he asked me. 

“ ‘But, didn’t Christianity contribute greatly to 
the making of your America?’ I inquired. 

“‘Christianity fiddlesticks!’ he exclaimed. ‘Our 
country was made by the pioneer spirit of our fore- 
[132] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 


fathers, who were always pushing ahead, seeking 
new territory and new power. And you can be sure 
that Christianity had very little to do with that, 
whatever they may have thought about it, for a 
religion is always a conservative and never a pioneer¬ 
ing thing.’ ” 

“Yes, I have heard that same sort of talk,” re¬ 
marked Dr. Lo. “But you must remember that 
students are always doing a lot of talking that has 
little real understanding behind it.” 

“I know that, of course. And it wasn’t just talk¬ 
ing that influenced me. I kept on going to church. 
Once in a while somebody would ask me if I was 
a Christian, and I always said that I was. One 
summer I was a delegate to a student Christian con¬ 
ference. 

“But all the time I kept looking at the people 
in the towns where I found myself. I watched the 
things that they did, and I tried to analyze their 
motives. I read the newspapers. You know the 
sort of things they have in them—lynchings, race 
riots, lawbreaking of all sorts. 

“And do you know what I kept remembering? I 
kept remembering something that one of the mis¬ 
sionary teachers had said to me here in China in the 
old school days, something that did a lot to induce 
me to become a Christian. I had demanded of him 
what superiority there was in the teaching of Jesus 
over that of Confucius that should make me, a 
Chinese, desert Confucianism for Christianity. 
[133] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


“ ‘The teachings of Confucius are very lofty/ my 
teacher had acknowledged. ‘But how many men do 
you know who live up to those teachings?’ 

“And when I had to admit that there were not 
many who did so, my teacher said that right there 
was the difference between Confucianism and Chris¬ 
tianity—that Confucianism had only a high standard 
of ethics, while Christianity offered also a power to 
make it possible to achieve that high standard. 

“Well, what proof is there, when you study a 
country like America as a whole, that her Christian¬ 
ity gives her people any more power with which to 
achieve the ideals of Jesus than we have with which 
to achieve the ideals of Confucius? Look at the 
conditions in business, in politics, in society, some¬ 
times in their very churches. Do you call them 
Christian?” 

“Not yet,” replied Dr. Lo, at which his com¬ 
panion shot him a quick and questioning look. 
Then, without demanding further enlightenment, he 
plunged ahead. 

“I came back to China greatly upset religiously. 
It’s hard to talk about such things, but, in my early 
student days, my religion had meant a lot to me. 
It had meant so much that I couldn’t throw it over¬ 
board without a struggle. You know the condition 
China was in two years ago when I came home. 
And I used to come to these Sunday-afternoon meet¬ 
ings—I was even a member of one of the committees 
in charge—and hear men say, in all sorts of ways, 
[134] 



A CHRISTIAN NURSE IN DR. IDA KAHN’S HOSPITAL, NANCHANG A 
TYPE OF THE CHINESE NEW WOMAN, WHO IS SEEKING 
AN OUTLET FOR TRUE SERVICE. 




THROUGH THE CHRISTIAN ENTERPRISE, WITH ITS MANY POSSIBILITIES FOR HELPFUL SERVICE, 
THE YOUTH OF CHINA AND THE YOUTH OF AMERICA FIND A BASIS OF REAL FRIENDSHIP. 




THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 


what amounted to, c Jesus is the hope of China.* 

“What made me do it is more than I know, but 
I began to question those statements. For what does 
Jesus offer China? Brotherhood, righteousness, and 
other fine ideals like that, all growing out of a life 
of universal love. And what China needs, what 
China must have if she is to be saved from her ene¬ 
mies, is not love, so helpless in a world like this, 
but an iron might. 5 * 

“Are you sure that is what China needs? 55 

“How else is she to defend herself and become 
strong? 55 

“I think that there 5 s another way. Any Christian 
ought to believe that there’s another way. But we 
will not argue that. Is this iron heart all that China 
needs? 55 

“Of course not. There are many things. 55 

“What are they? 55 Dr. Lo persisted. 

“There’s the spirit of scientific inquiry, 55 Mr. Tang 
replied. “China needs to learn how to discover the 
facts about the world and life. She cannot possibly 
succeed in attaining strength in this scientific age 
without that.” 

“And you think that Christianity is opposed to 
the spirit of scientific inquiry?” 

“Surely it is. Look at the unscientific beliefs they 
tell us we must swallow if we are to be Christians!” 

“Anything else?” 

“Many other things. But those are the principal 
ones.” 

[ 135 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


“So, if I understand you correctly, you have al¬ 
most lost your interest in Christianity because of the 
impractical nature of Christian teaching, and because 
you don’t think that a man can be a Christian and 
at the same time a modern scientific thinker. Is that 
right?” 

“That’s about right.” 

“You must excuse me if I sound impolite, but 
you ought to know that such a charge is nonsense. 
There is no better science being taught in China just 
now than in some Christian colleges. Yet suppose 
everything you say were true. Do you know a better 
religion than Christianity?” 

A pause. 

“Do you mean, as a teaching, or as people prac¬ 
tice it?” 

“Either way. But primarily as a teaching.” 

“No, I know no better one.” 

“Then why forsake it so easily?” 

“I’m not.” The words shot back with a deadly 
earnestness that could not be mistaken. “That’s why 
I came back to the service today. I am not ready 
to cut loose yet. But, Doctor, it isn’t so much a case 
with me of Christianity as compared with other re¬ 
ligions. The question that torments me is this, Why 
any religion at all?” 

And the two passed on, deep in a discussion such 
as occupies many minds in China today. For in the 
changes that are coming in China, there is nowhere 
a deeper stirring than in the realm of religion. Here 
[136] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 


it is that, finally, the most profound impression may 
be made upon Chinese character. And to many 
Chinese this struggle, as it resolves itself, is becom¬ 
ing not one between a new religion and older faiths, 
but between religion and no faith. It is a struggle 
for faith itself upon which China is entering. 

China has never been a nation overly given to re¬ 
ligious contemplation. There have, to be sure, been 
thousands of Chinese who have withdrawn from life 
to build up the health of their souls in some quiet 
monastery. But the Chinese have never lived in the 
religious atmosphere that has been characteristic, for 
example, of India. As a whole, they have been 
rather material-minded, thinking more about the 
securing of rice and the success of business than the 
favor of the gods. Indeed, the favor of the gods 
has been largely sought that the other material gains 
might be assured. 

To a large degree, the influence of Confucius and 
his disciples has been responsible for this hard- 
headed attitude toward life. The first interest of 
the great sages was in laying out patterns of con¬ 
duct that would bring men peace, well-being, and 
the respect of their fellows in this life. Confucius 
himself refused to talk about any other life when 
pressed by his followers, pleading that he knew too 
little about this. Reduced to its essence, the teach¬ 
ing of the Great Master came to this—that if a 
man would watch with care his conduct in this ex¬ 
istence, the future would care for itself. 

[137] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


Yet along with this rather circumscribed outlook 
—what might be termed a true agnosticism—there 
has gone a popular belief in the reality of a spiritual 
world that has made the Chinese unwilling to be 
content with a mere philosophy, and has caused them, 
in their temples, to experiment with all kinds of 
religious approaches. Thus it has come to pass that 
while the Chinese has been, at bottom, a good deal 
of a materialist, he has also given devoted allegiance 
to several systems of faith. 

Writers about the religions of China generally 
mention three—Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism. 

Confucianism, as the Chinese students are today 
insisting, is really not a religion at all. Confucius 
would have been of all men most horrified had he 
been told that, after his death, the attempt would 
be made to deify him, and to set up a method of 
soul salvation based upon his precepts. But that 
happened. Confucius left, not a religion, but a phi¬ 
losophy. His great gift to China was a set of ethical 
principles which, if followed, would insure peace in 
the State and good-will among men. To this day, 
there are no idols in Confucian temples 5 only the 
simple tablets bearing the names and honors of the 
Great Master and his leading disciples. 

The fate that befell Confucianism is an illumi¬ 
nating commentary on the insatiable demand of the 
human soul for an object of worship. The great 
teacher died almost five hundred years before the 
[138] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 


birth of Christ, a disappointed man whose wisdom 
had been rejected by almost all the rulers of China. 
His immediate followers determined to perpetuate 
his teachings, and, as the years passed, they began 
to shine forth for the lofty precepts that they were. 
Within a few hundred years what had begun as 
veneration for a sage began to take on the elements 
of worship. And since then, at sporadic intervals, 
there have been attempts to present this teaching as 
a code of religion, with the modest teacher of old 
exalted to a place in the heavens. 

Lao-tze, the founder of Taoism, was a contem¬ 
porary of Confucius, but a different sort of man. 
He was a mystic, and as eager to dwell in the world 
of spirits as Confucius was glad to keep out of it. 
Lao-tze tried to explain the inner mystery at the 
core of life with a mystical term, much as did the 
author of the Fourth Gospel in the New Testament. 
That writer used a Greek term, the Logos, that we 
have never been able to translate satisfactorily into 
English. Lao-tze used a Chinese term, the Tao, 
that also defies complete translation. Perhaps the 
term “way” is as good a rendering as any. So 
Lao-tze left China Taoism, or the religion of the 
way of salvation. 

But, in the course of thousands of years, the re¬ 
ligion of Taoism has suffered a sad decline. Lao-tze 
was a pure-hearted mystic, in whose teachings are 
to be found many beautiful and true things. But 
[139] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


when men come to deal too familiarly with the mys¬ 
tical, it is easy to decline from the spiritual to the 
spiritualistic. And so Taoism has come to be nothing 
more than a secret necromancy, by which the spirits 
that people the universe can be placated and good 
luck secured for him who patronizes the priests. 

Buddhism is the great missionary religion of the 
East. Born of the spiritual search of Gautama in 
India, it came over the mountains to China not long 
after other apostles had begun to take another re¬ 
ligion westward. Today there is little Buddhism 
left in India proper, but in all eastern Asia it pro¬ 
foundly affects millions of lives. 

There is something in the fundamental assump¬ 
tions of Buddhism that will always appeal to the 
mind of the East. For the great revelation that 
was given to Gautama was that men are without 
peace in heart because they are chained to the “wheel 
of desire,” which bears them endlessly through a 
round of torments, and that peace is simply the 
abandonment of all desire and the giving of oneself 
to untroubled contemplation. The gift that Bud¬ 
dhism offers the perplexed is, therefore, the art of 
“letting go,” of seeing the emptiness of the concerns 
of life, and of becoming self-composed. When the 
devotee has achieved perfectly this power of self¬ 
containment, he becomes a Buddha, “an enlightened 
one.” Until that time, he remains on the wheel 
of life, passing through one incarnation after an¬ 
other. 


[ 140 ] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 


Two other religions must also be mentioned when 
talking of the faith of the Chinese. 

Mohammedanism came to China while Mo¬ 
hammed still lived. It has known periods of great 
favor, but for centuries now the Mohammedans have 
lived distinct from the rest of the Chinese. There 
are about five times as many Mohammedans in China 
as Christians, but there is no missionary fervor 
among them. They are to be found in large num¬ 
bers in such an outlying province as Kansu, and in 
smaller colonies in the cities, where they carry on 
trades that are restricted to Mohammedans, and live 
in quarters as distinct as a Jewish ghetto in the West. 

The real religion of millions of Chinese is none 
of these, but animism. This animism may have been 
influenced to some degree by one of the other faiths. 
In truth, modern Taoism is practically animism. 
For the mass of the humble folk of China, religion 
consists in knowing the names of the spirits that 
fill the atmosphere, in discovering what it is that 
makes most of them so malignant, and in carrying 
on such sacrifices or ceremonies as shall keep these 
spirits in good humor. 

It is impossible for the Westerner to understand 
the common Chinese fear of malignant spirits until 
he has lived in the midst of it. Indeed, he may live 
in it for years and never realize the hold which 
it has upon his native neighbors. For it would be 
impossible, in the limits of such a book as this, even 
to catalog the devils and evil spirits that people the 
[HI] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


very air for the average Chinese. But there they 
are, millions of them. They hover around every 
motion of every waking hour, and they enter the 
sanctity of sleep. An intricate system of circum¬ 
venting them, that makes the streets twist in a fashion 
to daze Boston’s legendary cow and puts walls in 
front of doors to belie the hospitality within, runs 
throughout the social order. The pursuit of this 
system is the real religion of millions. 

There are large parts of China where Taoism, as 
an organized form of worship, is disappearing. 
There are no regular services in the temples, and 
the priests are seen usually in the funeral processions 
of wealthy people who patronize all the creeds in 
order to assure the deceased the benefit which any 
may be able to give. But the belief in spirits upon 
which Taoism battens will not be gone for a long, 
long time. And the Christian who reads in the news¬ 
papers that the Senate of the United States has ad¬ 
journed so that it may not be forced to do business 
on Friday the thirteenth, will hardly expect to 
see the power of Chinese superstition pass in this 
generation. 

The rapidly decreasing reputation of the Buddhist 
priesthood points to the eventual disappearance of 
the Buddhist religion. No faith can finally survive 
whose servants do not exhibit elements of moral 
strength greater than those possessed by the run of 
men. There have been attempts at a Buddhist re- 
[H2] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 


vival in many parts of China recently. Within some 
of the monasteries the sympathetic searcher may still 
find sweet and simple spirits, the purity of whose 
lives and the ardor of whose religious passion com¬ 
mand respect. And so long as Buddhism can pro¬ 
duce such lives at all y it is entitled to respectful 
consideration. 

But these are not the aspects of Buddhism that 
the masses of Chinese see. They see the ignorant, 
lazy, often immoral parasites who make up the mass 
of the two million Buddhist priests. The Ho-shan 
(priest) with his endless pursuit of easy money and 
an easy life is as much the butt of the tea-room 
satirist as was the overfed friar of the medieval 
storyteller of Europe. 

There are some truths in Buddhism that will live 
in the faith of China for all time, but the unworthy 
priesthood is the best indication that these truths 
must find their final home, their fulfilment, in a 
purer spiritual atmosphere. In many centers men 
are seldom to be seen in the Buddhist temples today, 
and when there, they are apt to be in an apologetic 
mood. Yet, in the deepest moments of life, when 
death enters the household, it is seldom that the 
priests are not summoned. 

The somnolence that seems to have befallen Con¬ 
fucianism should not deceive anyone as to its power. 
The philosophy that has molded a civilization for 
twenty-five hundred years is not going to pass away 
in a decade. It is true that recent attempts to revive 
[ 14-3 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


Confucianism as a national worship have not been 
successful. But that does not change the fact that 
Confucianism, with its doctrine of the golden mean, 
by which men are guarded against excess of any kind, 
and its morality designed to bring reward in this life, 
underlies the thinking of every Chinese who thinks 
at all. And, as the philosophy of the Chinese, Con¬ 
fucianism will live on. It is a wonderful philosophy* 
and much better adapted to the practical working 
out of a Kingdom of Heaven on earth than most 
of the philosophy that has come from Western 
lands. 

There need be no bitter conflict between Chris¬ 
tianity and Confucianism. With spiritual needs sat¬ 
isfied elsewhere, Confucianism will become what its 
founder intended it to be, the system of thought by 
which the Chinese orders the affairs of his daily life. 
Teachings which do not conform to the demands of 
the present-—and no system can stand without 
change for twenty-five centuries—will be modified 
by the words of later disciples. A century hence 
the Chinese leader will be as quick to acknowledge 
the abiding value of many of the lessons taught 
by the greatest sage of his race as he will be to 
proclaim his place among the disciples of that other 
Master. 

For it is impossible to talk of the religious rev¬ 
olution that is taking place in China without telling 
of the growth of the power of this other Master. 
In the previous chapters of this book we have caught 
[144] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 

glimpses of the influence, both direct and indirect, 
that Christianity has exerted in transforming Chinese 
life to its depths. It is a thrilling story—this of 
the growth of the religion of the Cross in this mighty 
land. 

Christianity first came to China not long after 
Buddhism, borne by certain emissaries of the Nes- 
torian branch of the Eastern Church. What it ac¬ 
complished then we cannot tell, for the only record 
that we have is a short inscription graven on a single 
stone tablet. 

Later, at the time that Protestantism was coming 
to life in Western Europe, those hardy Catholic 
pioneers, the Jesuits, penetrated China. Their great 
leader, St. Francis Xavier, died before the gates had 
opened. In all missionary history, perhaps, there is 
no more poignant cry than that of Xavier as, after 
his days of achievement in India, Ceylon, Japan, he 
lay dying on a little island off that China coast that 
had repelled him, and cried in desperation, “O rock, 
rock! wilt thou never break?” 

The rock has broken. The Jesuit missions became 
entangled in questions that bordered on politics 
(curiously enough, these grew out of a dispute over 
the proper Chinese character with which to express 
the Christian name for God) and were sternly re¬ 
pressed for centuries. In 1807, however, the first 
Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, reached 
Canton, and after that the way opened more and 
more for Christian effort. 

[145] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


The growth of the Christian Church in China has 
been phenomenal. When Robert Morrison lay dy¬ 
ing, after twenty-seven years of as devoted labor 
as any man ever gave to the cause of the Kingdom, 
he gathered the other missionaries about him, and, 
as they reviewed the less than twenty converts that 
they had secured in more than a quarter of a century, 
they agreed that it was scarcely to be hoped that 
there could be a thousand baptized Christians at the 
close of a century. Yet when the century of effort 
ended, despite the bloody massacre of Christians that 
fell upon the young Church just seven years before 
that anniversary, it was discovered that there were 
179,000 Protestant church members in good stand¬ 
ing! And when an enumeration was made again in 
1922, only fifteen years after the Morrison Cen¬ 
tenary, it was found that the church membership 
had grown in the interval to about four hundred 
thousand, with twenty-five thousand Chinese pas¬ 
tors caring for them. 

It is said that the Church is growing at a more 
rapid rate in China today than in any other part of 
the Protestant world. Practically every mission re¬ 
ports that there are more seekers after truth than 
can be cared for by the present forces. For years 
Christian missionaries called upon their supporters 
in America and other lands to pray that the doors 
of China might be opened. No doubt you have 
heard some of those prayers. Today they have been 
answered, and the embarrassment that besets the 
[146] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 


workers is as to how, with circumscribed forces, they 
are to take advantage of the unprecedented oppor¬ 
tunities thus presented. 

Christianity is certainly the most aggressive re¬ 
ligious force in China today. Its influence is being 
felt in all these realms of Chinese life of which 
we have already spoken—in education, in social cus¬ 
toms, in the life of Chinese women, and in industry. 
There are Christian evangelistic centers of some kind 
in four fifths of all the counties (1,704) of China. 
And the power of Christianity is clearly on the side 
of the forces that are making for an intelligent, 
self-reliant, prosperous nation. 

But the great opposition that the Christian worker 
has to face in China just now is not that of the old 
faiths. It is the opposition of those who say that 
all religion tends to superstition, and that a modern 
and enlightened nation will build its life without 
giving religion a place. 

This does not necessarily mean a plea for the 
adoption of materialism. There have been Chinese 
who have argued that a thoroughgoing materialism, 
seeking material benefits at whatever cost and 
through the power of a militaristically organized 
state, offered the only hope of strength in a world 
like ours. But the Chinese have a fundamental dis¬ 
trust, growing out of their long generations of 
disregard for the soldier, of a program like that. 
Besides, there have been enough examples in the 
world of late to prove that a militaristic materialism, 
[147] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


while it may succeed for a time, does not guarantee 
the enduring good fortune of a people. 

Yet, rejecting materialism, there are many Chi¬ 
nese who would likewise reject religion. The chan¬ 
cellor of the National University of Peking, Tsai 
Yuan-pei, one of the most influential men in China 
today, is one of these. A hero to most of China’s 
students, and a man of unblemished character, Chan¬ 
cellor Tsai has dismissed religion—any religion, all 
religion—as simply a survival from some lower stage 
of man’s development, and has suggested that, for 
the educated modern, the place once filled by religion 
should be taken by some form of esthetics and ethics. 
Perhaps ethical culture is the term that comes 
closest to expressing what Chancellor Tsai has in 
mind. 

The strength of this movement toward “no re¬ 
ligion” is underestimated by many of the people who 
have not penetrated under the surface of Chinese 
student life. But when you talk with a group of 
thinking Chinese, you will not go far without dis¬ 
covering that they are questioning the very founda¬ 
tions of religion. This is true even in student bodies 
that have been under direct religious influence. 

Two or three years ago a Chinese friend and I 
tried to find out what students were asking in the 
higher grade mission schools in eastern China. 
Questions such as these proved the common ones: 

“Why should we have religion since it is super¬ 
stition that causes stagnation in progress?” 

[148] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 

“Is not socialism better for China than Christian¬ 
ity?” 

“Is not belief in immortality a kind of supersti¬ 
tion?” 

“How can we believe in the miracles (of the 
Bible)? To the scientific point of view, they are 
absolutely untrue.” 

A bishop friend of mine went out to the province 
of Szechwan not long ago, on the western border 
of China. If anywhere, you would have expected 
such ideas to have made little progress in that re¬ 
mote section. Yet when he asked what the Szech- 
wanese students were thinking about, he received 
such queries as these: 

“Is the existence of the human soul true?” 

“Is there a real and imperishable soul left after 
the death of any person?” 

“Can the soul consciously sense itself?” 

“What is the real aim of the missionaries who 
travel about China?” 

Early in 1922 there came to Peking student dele¬ 
gates from more than twenty nations, to hold a 
convention of the World’s Student Christian Fed¬ 
eration. Certainly there was more than ordinary 
significance in the holding of such a gathering in 
the old Chinese capital. Perhaps the Chinese who 
would face the new day without religious allegiances 
sensed this, for they greeted the delegates from 
abroad in an extremely aggressive manner. Sig¬ 
nificantly enough, this movement took the form of 
[149] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


organizing anti-Christian federations, thus demon¬ 
strating the way in which, in the minds of the stu¬ 
dents, the cause of religion has come to be identified, 
for the future, with that of Christianity. Most of 
the activities of the anti-Christian forces at that time 
consisted of issuing proclamations, denouncing re¬ 
ligion as superstition. But since then the movement 
away from religion has taken a more serious turn. 

At the annual conference of the Association for 
the Advancement of Education, for instance, the 
commission on problems of elementary education 
brought in a resolution urging all teachers not to teach 
religion in any way in any elementary school, and 
especially not to teach such a belief as that there is 
a Supreme Being in the universe, as a thing which 
has not been proved and cannot be proved. The res¬ 
olution, adopted by the Association, has been sent 
broadcast over China. The standing of the Asso¬ 
ciation among teachers is very high. 

But while the forces that would wean China away 
from all religion are thus showing strength, the 
forces that make for faith are likewise gaining. Es¬ 
pecially is this true of the Christian Church. We 
have already mentioned its rapid numerical growth. 
There are other, and more striking, signs of increas¬ 
ing power. 

Most hopeful of all is the increase in responsi¬ 
bility upon the part of the Chinese themselves. For 
a century the Protestant work in China was the work 
of “missions.” Devoted men and women crossed the 
[150] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 

seas to spend their lives in service for the Chinese. 
About them there gathered groups of converts, but 
the control of the enterprise was always in the hands 
of the missionary. Today this is rapidly changing. 
The groups of converts are becoming self-conscious 
churches. The “native helpers” are becoming self- 
reliant pastors. The missionary is becoming an ad¬ 
viser who works with and through others, rather 
than a man who must bear all the great burdens 
alone. In other words, the years of planting are 
bringing forth their harvest of an indigenous Chinese 
Christianity. 

This transformation, which amounts almost to a 
revolution within Chinese Christianity, was graphi¬ 
cally illustrated at the National Christian Confer¬ 
ence which met in 1922. Fifteen years earlier, when 
the centenary of Morrison’s landing was celebrated 
with a similar gathering, it was called a National 
Missionary Conference, and every single delegate 
was a foreigner. Now it has become a National 
Christian Conference, and more than half of the 
thousand delegates (omitting the visitors from 
abroad) are Chinese! There is a Chinese chairman. 
Chinese act as chairmen of the important commis¬ 
sions and committees. The basic report, that seeks 
to express “The Message of the Church to China,” 
is written entirely by Chinese. And when it seems 
that differing conceptions of the mission of the 
Church may bring a rift into the gathering, it is a 
Chinese, dean of a theological seminary in Peking, 

[151] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


Dr. Timothy T. Lew, who paints the picture of the 
Church upon which all can unite. That picture is so 
remarkable that we give it here, not only as a picture 
of what the Christian Church in China hopes to be, 
but as a picture of what the Christian Church should 
be around the world: 

“First of all, the Chinese Christian Church shall 
be a fearless fighter against sin. 

“Second, the Chinese Christian Church shall be 
a faithful interpreter of Jesus. 

“Third, the Chinese Christian Church shall stand 
as a flaming prophet of God. 

“Fourth, the Chinese Christian Church shall be 
a worthy teacher of the Bible. She shall not in the 
least fear, but, on the contrary, even welcome scien¬ 
tific investigation, and the most critical study any 
human being has the wisdom or folly to put to its 
pages. She shall not show any anxiety for the Bible 
by any negative means or unnecessary attempts to 
put a human fence around the eternal truth of God 
for its protection. Not the Bible alone, but all the 
teachings of the Church, she shall gladly submit to 
any true scientific tests and trials. She shall stand 
by the seeker of truth and bend over the reverent 
inquiring hearts as a divine pedagogue sent from 
God, with dauntless courage and divine patience to 
teach and guide as the Master used to do when he 
said to his disciples, ‘Come and see.’ 

“Fifth, the Chinese Church shall be a genuine 
servant to the Chinese people. 

[152] 


THE STRUGGLE FOR FAITH 

“Sixth, the Chinese Church shall be a defender 
of Christian unity and comprehensiveness. She shall 
stand for, nay, even fight for, unity in diversity, 
jealously to guard against any encroachment on the 
comprehensiveness which is her glory, her witness, 
and her power. 

“Under her protecting wings everyone shall find 
a place, Peter and John, Paul and Barnabas, and 
even the critical and doubting Thomas, for Christ 
is with her, his love constrains her members, his 
presence insures her safety. She shall teach her 
members to agree to differ but resolve to love.” 

To a large extent, the battle between religion and 
no religion that is being fought in China today is 
the same battle that is being fought in other parts 
of the world. And the outcome everywhere will be 
the same. “Mankind is incurably religious.” The 
need for strength beyond our own is felt in every 
land. The demand for faith will triumph over all 
other demands. 

In China this means that, in days to come, as the 
Chinese Church becomes increasingly self-reliant, its 
faith will become increasingly that of multitudes of 
Chinese. Already, when there are but four hun¬ 
dred thousand Protestant Christians among four 
hundred million people, it is astonishing how large 
a place the little group has come to fill in the life 
of the nation. When, for example, a Shanghai 
weekly last year held an open voting contest as to 
the twelve outstanding living Chinese, four on the 
[153] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 

list selected were acknowledged Christians, and five 
others were men who had shown much interest in 
Christianity. 

The Christianity of China’s future will be Chi¬ 
nese Christianity. It will be expressed by Chinese 
minds. It will emphasize the teachings that are most 
needed to meet China’s spiritual needs. It will show 
traces of the influences of all the great teachings 
of China’s past, just as our own faith shows the 
influence of the teachings that molded the men who 
bequeathed us our civilization. But in loyalty to 
Christ and in determination to exalt Him as Lord, 
Chinese Christianity will be as genuine an expression 
of faith as the Christianity of any other part of the 
world. 


[ 154 ] 


VIII 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 

In the days that followed the Manchu downfall 
a dozen years ago, Yuan Shih-kai, China’s first per¬ 
manent president, gave an audience to Dr. H. H. 
Lowry, at that time president of Peking Uni¬ 
versity. 

“You missionaries are responsible for this revo¬ 
lution,” the Chinese leader said. “Now you must 
see us through.” 

Dr. Lowry protested. “Your excellency, I have 
been in China almost forty years. In all that time 
I can assure you that it has been a cardinal principle 
of missionary policy never to interfere in Chinese 
politics. Whatever our sympathies may have been, 
you may be sure that the missionaries took no part 
in the recent political upheaval.” 

“That may be so,” the President replied. “But 
you are responsible, none the less. For what have 
you been doing during these forty years, you and 
your associates? You have been teaching that there 
is one true God, before whom all men stand as equal 
brothers. And you cannot teach that kind of doc¬ 
trine without leading to the sort of revolution that 
we have had in China.” 

There was an undeniable basis of truth in the 
charge made by the Chinese President. Any serious 
acceptance of the Christian doctrine of the father- 
[155] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


hood of God and brotherhood of man does have im¬ 
mediate relation to earthly despotisms. The gospel 
truly is, as Lowell said, dynamite, likely at any time 
to blow to pieces any ancient order. 

The Manchu throne was near to falling about the 
time of the American Civil War, when a Chinese 
enthusiast was fired with a strangely disordered per¬ 
ception of Christian ideas and launched the bloody 
Taiping rebellion. For almost two decades the 
rebels held much of the heart of the country, to 
be defeated at last only after more lives had been 
lost than fell in the battles of the World War. 

The end of the Manchus finally came a half cen¬ 
tury later, when a revolt, that started without plan¬ 
ning among troops stationed in Wuchang, spread 
until, without much fighting, the boy-emperor left 
his throne. The men and women who bore a lead¬ 
ing part in that revolution were, in instance after in¬ 
stance, persons who in schools and churches had been 
under Christian influence. The missionary must ac¬ 
cept a measure of responsibility for the changes in 
the Far East since the opening of this century. 

America, likewise, must acknowledge some re¬ 
sponsibility for, as well as interest in, China’s revo¬ 
lution. Since the opening to the West, it has been 
America that has been most near to capturing the 
Chinese imagination. Thousands of Chinese have 
studied in America. Other thousands have worked 
there. Near the city of Canton, for instance, there 
is a whole district largely inhabited by Chinese who 
[156] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 


have lived in America. It is more than a coincidence 
that Canton and its environs are a center of Chinese 
political progressivism. 

China, in her basic political life, which is the or¬ 
ganization of her villages, has always been demo¬ 
cratic. It remained, however, for America to dem¬ 
onstrate that the whole national life could be formed 
on a democratic model. And it was largely the 
American example that moved China to launch out 
upon her present governmental experiment. 

Moreover, America has an enormous interest in 
the success of this Chinese experiment because of 
the relative position of the two countries. The rec¬ 
ognition of the importance of the Pacific Basin in 
world politics has become a commonplace. More 
than two years ago the Powers testified to this by 
their willingness to submit their military and naval 
programs to the review of a Washington Conference. 
A glance at this strategic Pacific Basin shows that 
the two largest nations that touch it are America 
and China. China is still mighty, from the stand¬ 
point of modern states, only in its potentialities. 
But the safety of democracy in the world is bound 
to be enormously influenced, one way or the other, 
by the measure of success that attends the democratic 
experiment in China. 

If the western rim of the Pacific Basin shall see 
a strong, pacific democracy in control, spreading its 
message of government of, by, and for the people 
back to the very heart of Asia, the cause of de- 
[157] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


mocracy in all the world will be strengthened. But 
if there shall be only the mockery of a people’s 
hopes, and a mounting disorder that leads at last 
to the substitution of a new despotism for the old, 
the hope for a democratic world-order will suffer 
accordingly. Therefore it behooves America in her 
foreign policy to put at the forefront the wise sup¬ 
port of every effort that makes for the building of a 
permanent democracy in the republic that faces her 
across the Pacific. 

Of course, when President Yuan Shih-kai spoke 
to Dr. Lowry, he had in mind only the political 
revolution that had substituted a president for an 
emperor. And when we speak of the wisdom of 
giving support to the democratic movement in China, 
some will consider that only a call to political action. 
But those who have read this book will know that 
China’s revolution concerns many a realm other than 
the political, and that the challenge to our support 
comes from fields seldom mentioned in the news¬ 
paper despatches. 

We have seen that China’s revolution has been 
passing through a military phase, but that now there 
is beginning to be a reassertion of the ancient su¬ 
premacy of the educated man, who would found 
a new state on deeper, more transforming changes. 
So we have seen a revolution that, by making learn¬ 
ing democratic, is changing the cultural outlook for 
the entire nation. We have seen a revolution that 
dares to test old customs, beliefs, and social stand- 
[158] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 

ards, to see if they are fit to survive in a democratic 
and scientific age. We have seen a revolution that 
proclaims a new day for womanhood. We have 
seen a revolution that includes the growth of a new 
order of industry, with all its attendant problems. 
We have seen a revolution that even leads to a re¬ 
ligious crisis, with men hesitating between commit¬ 
ting their spiritual welfare to a new faith or re¬ 
jecting all belief in religion. And out of every one 
of these changes there comes the call for sympathy, 
understanding, and support. 

Primarily, of course, these problems of change 
are to be solved by the Chinese if they are ever 
solved at all. The outsider may point to experiences 
in the history of his own nation that hold suggestive 
value, or he may go further by giving encourage¬ 
ment to the men and women who are following 
what seem to him the best lines of advance. But 
the basic work and the mass of work must be done 
by the people directly involved. 

No foreigner, however well intentioned, can place 
Chinese leadership in the hands of the educated men 
and women who are fit for that leadership. It must 
be these men and women who themselves demon¬ 
strate their ability and take that leadership. No for¬ 
eigner can reform the social abuses of China. It 
must be Chinese who, speaking as patriots, make the 
abuses clear and lead in their abolition. No for¬ 
eigner can protect China from the ills of a conscience¬ 
less industrialism. It must be Chinese who bring 
[159] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


to pass an industrial order that escapes the pitfalls 
other nations have not escaped. No foreigner can 
give the final answer to China’s spiritual problems. 
It must be Chinese who, pioneering like all the great 
hearts of the ages, lead their people into light. In 
all these and other realms the foreigner may have 
valuable advice to give. But the burden of the 
change must finally be borne by Chinese. 

Yet this does not absolve the rest of the world 
from doing what is possible for the help of the Chi¬ 
nese. Out of self-interest, if for no higher motive, 
men in other lands should be filled with concern 
to see that China has the maximum of their help 
in this hour of change. For if there is any one 
fact as to the relation of nations that is being forced 
home upon us in these days, it is the fact of inter¬ 
dependence. The mechanical advances that have so 
lessened the difficulties of intercommunication have 
made it more true than ever that no nation lives 
unto itself, and that all are concerned in the good 
or ill of any. If this is true anywhere, how certainly 
it must be true in the case of a nation that com¬ 
prises a quarter of the world’s population! 

A few years ago there broke out in northern China 
an epidemic of the most dreadful disease known to 
medical science, the pneumonic plague. As far as 
the records show, there has never been a case in 
which a person has contracted this form of plague 
and recovered. And it is very easily contracted. 
But medical missionaries and well-trained Chinese 
[ 160 ] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 

physicians threw themselves into the work of isola¬ 
tion so promptly that, although thousands died, the 
area of devastation was held to a small part of 
North China. 

A few years later there broke out on the steppes 
of interior Asia a much milder form of disease, 
capable of cure by timely medical attention. There 
were no modern-trained doctors in that region, how¬ 
ever, so that the epidemic gained such headway 
that it swept around the world and, known as the 
Spanish influenza, destroyed more lives than the 
World War. 

The world’s experience with the pneumonic 
plague and with the Spanish influenza is a parable. 
The time has passed when there can be political, 
social, or moral sickness in any part of the globe, 
and all the world not be in danger. The sufferings 
of Russian mouzhiks under the knout may not have 
seemed, yesterday, a matter of importance to men 
in other nations. Today we know better. And the 
happiness or wretchedness of the great mass called 
Chinese may not seem, at this hour, to have any 
close connection with the welfare of other peoples. 
But tomorrow the interrelationship will be clear. 

The forces that are working for the making of 
a better China face tremendous odds. As those stu¬ 
dents go out to build a new nation on the firm 
foundation of popular education, they face the in¬ 
ertia of centuries, with the active opposition of most 
of the men controlling governmental revenues. As 
[ 161 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


new opportunities are sought for China’s women, 
the entrenched conservatism of forty centuries rises 
up in combative alarm. As men are told of new 
sources of inner strength, there is always to be felt 
the holding back of the feeling that “what was good 
enough for Grandfather is good enough for me.” 

Just because these difficulties do stand in the way, 
we should be the more eager to bear such help as 
is possible to the servants of new China. And there 
are definite things that we can do that will directly 
benefit. This help can be given in two directions, 
in China and at home. 

Obviously, one immediate way of supporting the 
effort to change China’s life in its fundamentals is 
to give to the Christian enterprise in China such 
backing as it has never had in the past. We can 
all rejoice at the rapid growth of the Christian com¬ 
munity. The question sometimes asked as to the 
worth of Christian missions has been answered by 
the Chinese who throng the mission stations in a 
more emphatic manner than any others could answer 
it. But the time has not yet come when the Christian 
forces have been able to respond to more than a 
small part of the calls that have come to them. 

Two years ago, in connection with the meeting of 
the National Christian Conference, there was com¬ 
pleted the most thorough survey ever made of any 
foreign-mission field. The results of that survey 
have been published in a great volume called The 
Christian Occupation of China. The book is much 
[ 162 ] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 


larger than most world atlases. But if you were 
to study the mass of facts in that volume carefully, 
you would discover that, despite the remarkable 
achievements of Christianity in China up to this time, 
there remain vast regions to be evangelized. Areas 
aggregating eight hundred and nineteen thousand 
square miles of China, for instance, still lie more 
than ten miles from any Christian center. More 
than 430,000 square miles for which missions have 
acknowledged responsibility for years is still rela¬ 
tively unoccupied. And in places that are called 
“occupied,” there are so few workers that only the 
most elemental form of effort is possible. 

There is a portion of the province of Szechwan, 
for example, for which the Methodist Episcopal 
Church has assumed responsibility. This is one of 
the strong missions, and the territory in question is 
strategic, lying in the heart of the province, athwart 
its main artery of travel, and containing about 
12,500,000 people. The foreign missionary force is 
ten, but all but two of these are held continually 
to the direction of institutions that make it impossible 
for them to do any itinerant preaching. There are 
seventy churches and chapels and forty schools, but 
these do not begin to meet the need. Each chapel 
has a preaching service once every few weeks, but the 
rest of the time it has nothing to offer. The press 
of inquirers is so great that a rule had to be adopted 
three years ago limiting the number of church mem¬ 
bers to be received in any year to a quarter of the 
[163] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


total already on the rolls, because of the lack of 
facilities to train the new converts. 

No one would call this adequate occupation of this 
area, yet this is one of the best-worked sections of 
West China. The same story might be repeated 
from almost every part of the country, and it would 
not be confined to lack of evangelistic equipment. 

Take the situation in the field of medical missions, 
one of the proved methods of making Christian 
benevolence clear. The China Medical Missionary 
Association has wisely judged that the minimum 
requirements for a mission hospital with fifty beds 
are two foreign doctors and one foreign nurse. 
But if the missions were to attempt to reach this 
standard, China would need three hundred addi¬ 
tional physicians and two hundred additional regis¬ 
tered nurses immediately. One half of the mission 
hospitals in China are still without the services of 
any foreign registered nurse, while thirty-four per 
cent have no trained nurses of any kind, Chinese or 
foreign. Eighty per cent of the mission hospitals 
had only one foreign or foreign-trained Chinese 
doctor when this survey was made. 

When the survey was made, there were ninety 
Chinese cities previously unoccupied within which 
missions had officially voted to open mission stations 
within five years. There were thirty-nine cities 
within which new hospitals were to be erected. These 
plans had been approved by the boards supporting 
these missions. But their carrying out would require 
[164] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 

a large increase in the support of the missionary 
cause. 

“One fourth of the total area of China’s eighteen 
provinces remains uncared for by any Protestant 
missionary or Chinese home missionary agency,” says 
Milton T. Stauffer, the man who edited the survey. 
“In addition, an area exceeding in extent the whole 
of China’s eighteen provinces and embracing almost 
all of Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, 
Kokonor, Chwanpien and Tibet, still remains neg¬ 
lected and practically unentered. To these great 
stretches of unworked territory we must add the 
cities of Indo-China, Formosa, the East Indies, and 
other places where the Chinese, estimated at over 
eight million, reside and where as yet comparatively 
little evangelistic work is done. Eighty-six per cent 
of Kansu, seventy-seven per cent of Manchuria, and 
seventy-five per cent of Kwangsi—if greater defi¬ 
niteness be needed to press home the point—are still 
outside the acknowledged responsibility of any Chris¬ 
tian evangelizing agency. Two thirds of all the 
counties of China (1,704) average less than five 
communicants per ten thousand inhabitants. One 
fifth report not a single evangelistic center. The 
missionaries giving full-time service to the evangeli¬ 
zation of China’s ten million Moslems can be counted 
on the fingers of one hand. There are approxi¬ 
mately twelve million tribespeople in Western and 
Southwestern China. These simple people are eager 
for the gospel message. Missionaries are welcome 
[165] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


where Chinese Christian workers might find it diffi¬ 
cult to work among them. Wherever the gospel 
has been preached, mass movements have resulted. 
Only the missionaries are too few—hardly one 
among 200,000.” 

The immense field still awaiting Christian effort 
in China was suggested by some of the appeals that 
accompanied the information sent to the men formu¬ 
lating the survey. From a European missionary in 
a lonely station in Mongolia came these words: 
“The Christian churches and mission societies have 
left the whole of Mongolia to us. We cannot get 
even one missionary to relieve us (for furlough). 
If you can do anything for Mongolia, please do it, 
and do it at once.” 

From Kansu, where the Moslem problem is most 
difficult, a young English worker wrote: “Every 
missionary is conscious of unoccupied areas. They 
extend from our very front doors, nay, from our 
private rooms, through innumerable districts and 
towns out into the desert silences of Sinkiang and 
Tibet. It is no sudden, spasmodic, individual busi¬ 
ness that will solve the problem - y only a prayerful 
united effort, in which we all share heartily and to 
the full.” 

What is to be our share in this prayerful and 
united effort? Is it to be the devotion of more of 
our income for the support of the enterprise? Yes, 
for many of us this will undoubtedly be a part that 
we can play. If we take our maps and draw a pencil 
[ 166 ] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 


hurriedly across the spots that we have mentioned 
as still inadequately occupied or unoccupied, and then 
remember that there are other regions that have not 
been here named, we will see that the mere business 
of bringing Christian opportunity to all China will 
require vastly more support than we have so far 
given the missionary cause. 

But to some of us the responsibility will not cease 
with the giving of more money. Money alone will 
not provide that new spiritual outlook which makes 
the complete transformation of the country possible. 
There must be a devotion of life that will reach 
into our colleges and professional schools and make 
the strongest students there face the demand: 
“Where can you better serve your generation than 
in such a center of world change as' this republic 
across the Pacific?” 

The feeling sometimes expressed, that the end 
of the missionary enterprise is at hand, can hardly 
survive in the light of the unoccupied fields we have 
mentioned. Just to keep the missionary force at 
its present level requires constant reinforcement, and 
the entering of new territory will increase the call. 
These missionaries, who must work hand in hand 
with Chinese Christians of fine training and devoted 
spirit, must be of as high caliber as it is possible 
for us to produce. As the Chinese dean of the the¬ 
ological seminary of Peking University said recently, 
“Do not stop sending missionaries, but send us better 
ones.” 


[ 167 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


There is no more outstanding Christian in China 
today than Dr. Cheng Ching-yi, who was the chair¬ 
man of the National Christian Conference of 1922. 
Last year Dr. Cheng had an opportunity to discuss 
this matter of missionary recruits with the leaders 
of the mission boards of America and Canada, and 
this is what he said: 

a The Church is seeking more missionaries. It is 
far from our purpose to give the impression that 
the coming forward of Chinese means that the mis¬ 
sionaries are to retire from the scene and that more 
of them are not needed. . . . There is a real need 
of, and room for, more new missionaries in China. 
In a sense, they are needed today more than ever 
before. 

“But a word is necessary regarding the mission¬ 
aries who are needed in China under the new con¬ 
ditions that have arisen. In addition to possessing 
spiritual and intellectual qualifications, the mission¬ 
ary of today needs thoroughly to understand that 
his task is to assist the Chinese Church, and to be 
willing to help, not to boss, his Chinese fellow 
workers. We need, therefore, those who possess a 
broad and sympathetic heart, and are able to form 
real friendship with the Chinese. 

“We need those who can see and appreciate all 
that is good, and beautiful, and true, wherever it is 
found. We need those who are willing to learn, 
as well as to teach, and who are prepared to work 
with the Chinese or even under them. We need 
[168] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 


those who have a real understanding of, and desire 
for, international brotherhood, and the spirit of tol¬ 
erance with those who differ from them. In a word, 
we need missionaries who are after the heart of 
God to ‘Come over and help usd . . . 

“The present situation is certainly different from 
that of former days, but the need is just as great 
and urgent, if not more so. We want friends; we 
desire partners and comrades; we seek for coopera¬ 
tion and sympathy. The work has never been so 
interesting and full of promise as it is today. All 
its problems and difficulties are but so many attrac¬ 
tions, that draw the men and women of vision and 
of a daring spirit to answer this magnificent and 
worthy call from afar.” 

A third way by which we may help in the making 
of the new China is by making clear our readiness 
to pass over control of the Christian work in China 
as rapidly as possible to the Chinese. Dr. Cheng 
hinted at that when he spoke of the need for mis¬ 
sionaries who would be “willing to help, not to boss.” 
The question is a ticklish one, and will, in its de¬ 
tails, involve matters of missionary administration 
that we need not trouble about here. It is the main 
principle that now confronts us. 

We must remember that Protestantism is now 
more than a hundred years old in China. This 
means that there are hundreds of third-generation 
Christians in the country—young men and women 
who have never lived in an atmosphere of idolatry, 
[169] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


but have been reared from the day of birth amid 
Christian surroundings. Many of these have re¬ 
ceived a college and professional school education. 
They have an understanding of the way in which 
Chinese approach problems that the missionary, even 
after years of experience, seldom attains. And they 
are as eager to make China Christian as we could 
ever be. Some of them are members of families 
that have suffered heavily for Christ’s sake. 

We should rejoice that such a group has come 
to the front, and that it is constantly growing. We 
should recognize as the crowning evidence of the 
success of the missionary labors of past years the 
requests of these Chinese Christians for an increas¬ 
ing measure of responsibility in church leadership. 
And when they ask for the privilege of laying out 
the plans by which the Church is to advance, we 
should see that here we have the beginning of that 
indigenous Church that is always the goal of mis¬ 
sionary effort. A child learns to walk by being given 
a chance to toddle alone. The child may stumble 
and trip and fall. As he staggers back and forth 
he may sometimes look a bit ludicrous, and we 
may stretch out a steadying finger. But we know 
better than to lift the child off the floor, for, with 
all his clumsiness, that is the way in which to learn 
to walk , and there is no other! Just so must it be 
with this child among the churches. And we can 
do no better to hasten a new day in China than to 
make it easy for this infant Church to assume con- 
[ 170 ] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 


trol of its own life, and, even though we may occa¬ 
sionally stretch out a helpful finger, show the Chris¬ 
tians of China that we have faith in their ability. 

Finally, we can help the making of a new China 
by continually studying and agitating that China 
may be freed from the evils that the West has 
pressed upon her. The story of the dealings of 
Western nations with China is not comfortable read¬ 
ing. For almost a century now that land has felt 
that considerations of justice and square dealing were 
being outraged by nations that possessed superior 
military force. Nor has this sort of treatment been 
confined to the European nations, as Americans have 
sometimes tried to tell themselves. Last year Mr. 
Tyler Dennett wrote an exhaustive study, made from 
original official documents, on Americans In Eastern 
A sia^ and when he came to the close of its seven 
hundred pages he was forced to this judgment: “No 
nation, either of the East or West, has escaped the 
valid charge of bad faith. . . . Each nation, the 
United States not excepted, has made its contribution 
to the welter of evil which now comprises the Far 
Eastern question.” 

We will admit, if we will think but a moment, 
that, in the usual course of history, China’s revolu¬ 
tion, with its accompanying unrest, is likely to last 
for years yet to come. No other nation has ever 
attempted a change in its life without a similar period 
of disorder. Even the United States—although at 

1 Tyler Dennett, The Macmillan Co., New York. 1923. $5.00. 

[ 171 ] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


the time of its revolution there were but three mil¬ 
lion people, with a comparatively high degree of 
culture living in a virgin territory—went through 
years of struggle that really did not end until 1865. 
What, then, is to be expected of a revolution among 
a quarter of our race, most of these without educa¬ 
tion, and spread across the heart of a continent long 
inhabited? 

Understanding and sympathy for these apostles 
of a new day in China will come only if we make 
a point of knowing what they are doing. That will 
require constant study, but there are books and mag¬ 
azines that make such study possible and easy. Some 
measure of the reality of our desire to become world 
citizens may be found in the extent to which we do 
this definite thing whereby the struggle for a better 
China may be aided. 

There are at least three equally definite things that 
can be done in America to help forward a new day 
in China. Some of these have already been started, 
but all of them can be developed to a degree hitherto 
unreached. 

We can, for one thing, provide the best we have 
in the way of advanced training for Chinese leaders. 
The movement that began about forty years ago, 
when the first group of Chinese students came to 
this country, and received such an impetus with the 
devotion of a portion of the Boxer indemnity funds 
to the same purpose, should be still more greatly 
extended. The action of the churches, in uniting 
[172] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 


for the support of several great union universities 
in China, and of such a body as the China Medical 
Board, in placing in Peking one of the world’s finest 
medical schools, will put a first-class modern educa¬ 
tion at the disposal of hundreds of Chinese who could 
not cross the ocean. But there will be hundreds 
of others who will answer the lure of study abroad. 
When these come to us, whether in our schools or 
for that practical schooling that many now seek in 
an industrial plant, we must make available for them 
the best that we have. It is impossible to gauge the 
ultimate effect of such training. 

Not so long ago I picked up a pamphlet. It told 
of the work of the Christian Association that has 
been formed among the Chinese college students 
in America. This association is not very old. In 
the pamphlet I found a picture of its first conven¬ 
tion, held in Rochester, New York, in 1909. Now, 
that does not seem very long ago, does it? You 
would not expect much to have been accomplished 
by a group of college students since 1909, would 
you? But as I glanced at that photograph, I found 
there a man who was later China’s oustanding dele¬ 
gate at the Paris Peace Conference, and her repre¬ 
sentative in the delicate task of taking back Shantung 
Province from Japanese control; a man who is the 
president of one of her two largest government 
universities 5 a man who is at the head of the sci¬ 
entific demonstration department of her National 
Y.M.C.A.; a man who is one of the leading profes- 
[173] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


sors of St. John’s University, a school notable for the 
number of national leaders it has produced. And 
there were among those twenty or thirty students 
still others who have already contributed largely 
to the making of a new China. All since 1909! 

A second definite contribution that we can make 
in America is to take steps to see that the conditions 
in our schools and towns do not outrage the expec¬ 
tations of the Chinese who come to us looking for 
an example of Christian civilization. The experi¬ 
ence of the Chinese told about in a previous chap¬ 
ter of this book is not an unusual experience. Too 
many Chinese bring to America the loftiest expec¬ 
tations, based largely on the character of the mis¬ 
sionaries they have seen and accepted as typical 
Americans, only to find American college students 
trifling away their time with matters of no im¬ 
portance, and social customs permitted that give the 
lie to all our Christian pretensions. There are al¬ 
ways about fifteen hundred Chinese studying in 
America, and it is distressing to know how many of 
them find their spiritual foundations undermined by 
these unworthy examples of what a Christian com¬ 
munity ought to be. 

“It is not long since a fine Chinese friend of 
mine,” writes one American, “who was a radiant, 
enthusiastic Christian when I first knew him—his 
very face reflecting the joy of his life—sailed back 
to China to become professor of history in a fine 
new Chinese university. He had been in this coun- 
[174] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 


try about ten years, except for a period spent in 
France during the war, and he was going back a 
cynic, with no use for Christianity, more or less 
scornful of high ideals, saying that the ideals of 
Christianity were utterly impossible and that we 
ought not to offer them to people. He was almost 
ready to argue that Christianity had not accomplished 
anything good for the world and was perfectly will¬ 
ing to tell you that China would be better off if 
Christianity had never gone there.” 

Does there ever a Chinese enter the community 
in which you live? If there does, you have a re¬ 
sponsibility toward the making of new China by 
giving that Chinese an object-lesson in what Chris¬ 
tian living means. Not by preaching, but by acting, 
can most be done to convince these men and women 
who will wield large influence in the future that our 
Christian faith is in truth a power that will trans¬ 
form, even as the life of their beloved China must 
be transformed. 

Finally, among all true Christians there should 
be taken such steps as will help to protect China, 
and all other nations, against any unrighteousness 
upon the part of our government and commercial 
interests, or upon the part of others. This means 
that we must cultivate the interests and outlook of 
world Christians. We must live on the basis already 
stated, that there cannot be disease of any kind— 
physical, industrial, or moral—in any part of the 
world without it being our concern. We must be 
[175] 


CHINA’S REAL REVOLUTION 


as eager to see health come to men and women half 
a globe away as to those who live beside us on our 
own continent. 

Much of the exploitation against which such a 
nation as China is now rebelling comes from the 
eagerness of commercial interests to reap large and 
easy profits. Years ago there grew up the political 
doctrine that a nation should support its citizens, 
no matter what sort of business they might engage 
in, outside of national boundaries. A great deal of 
the world’s trouble has grown out of the applica¬ 
tion of that doctrine. It is time for Christian citi¬ 
zens to demand that, if the protection of the flag is 
to extend to overseas traders, those traders submit 
the control of their business to the government. 
And if this is done, it seems clear that, as world 
Christians, we should demand the adoption of at least 
three principles for the control of this overseas in¬ 
dustry: (1) that no development of the resources 
of another country take place upon terms unaccept¬ 
able to the people of that country; (2) that no de¬ 
velopment take place upon terms that would rob the 
people of that country, either temporarily or per¬ 
manently, of the wealth that such resources should 
secure for them; (3) that no development take place 
upon terms that would place the value of the product 
above the welfare of the worker. 

We must see that injustice, even when it is prac¬ 
tised against a nation not in a position immediately 
to resist, leads, in the long run, to war. As world 
[176] 


AMERICA AND CHINA’S REVOLUTION 

Christians, our first concern must be for the establish¬ 
ment of peace among men, and peace can come only 
in an era that is governed by justice and truth and 
mutual regard. 

We must recognize that the struggle that the Chi¬ 
nese are making to secure a better China is not an 
isolated struggle. It is but part of the struggle that 
all of us should be engaged in, to make all the lands 
better lands. So the setbacks of the Chinese will 
be one with our setbacks. So their successes will be 
one with ours. And we will learn, as the days pass, 
how to give them reinforcement in their hours of 
need. For the battle for a better world must be 
won everywhere before it can finally be won any¬ 
where. 

Let the world rejoice because China is astir. 
There may be discomfort in such disorders as mark 
the present day of transition, but there is likewise 
life. There is fine courage in the attempt that so 
many Chinese are making to produce higher levels 
of living, not only in the realms that we have so 
briefly mentioned in this book, but in other realms 
as well. We salute that courage. And we pledge 
ourselves, in the spirit of world friendliness, to help 
as it is possible for us to help, in order that the 
dreams of these brave Chinese men and women may 
be realized, and China’s life be revolutionized, both 
within and without. 


[ 177 ] 


READING LIST 


General 

Beyond Shanghai. Harold Speakman. Abingdon Press, New 
York. 1922. $2.50. 

Charm of the Middle Kingdom , The . J. M. Marsh. Little, 
Brown and Co., New York. 1922. $3.00. 

China and Her Peoples. L. E. Johnston. George H. Doran 
Co., New York. 1924. $1.50. 

China: An Interpretation . James W. B ashford. Abingdon 
Press, New York. 1919. $2.50., 

China Awakened . M. T. Z. Tyau. The Macmillan Co., 
New York. 1922. $5.00. 

China From Within. Impressions and Experiences. Charles 
Ernest Scott. Fleming H. Revell Co., New York. 
1917. $2.00. 

China y Yesterday and Today . Edward Thomas Williams. 
T. Y. Crowell Co., New York. 1923. $4.00. 

Chinese Characteristics. Arthur Henderson Smith. Fleming 
H. Revell Co., New York. 1900. $2.00. 

Swinging Lanterns. Elizabeth Crump Enders. D. Appleton 
and Co., New York. 1923. $2.50. 

History and Politics 

An American Diplomat in China. Paul S. Reinsch. Double¬ 
day, Page and Co., New York. 1922. $4.00. 

China in the Family of Nations. Henry T. Hodgkin. George 
H. Doran Co., New York. 1923. $2.00. 

China's Story. William Elliot Griffis. Houghton Mifflin 
Co., Boston. New Edition. 1922. $1.25. 

Civilization of China, The. H. A. Giles, Henry Holt Co., 
New York. 1911. 50 cents. 

[ 178 ] 


READING LIST 

Fight for the Republic in China , The. B. L. Putnam We ale 
(B. L. Simpson). Dodd, Mead and Co., New York. 1917 
$3.50. 

Foreign Relations of China } The. Mingchien Joshua Bau. 

Fleming H. Revell Co., New York. 1921. $4.00. 

Marco Polo: Travels. Translated by W. Marsden. Every¬ 
man’s Library.. E. P. Dutton Co., New York. 1908. 35 
and 70 cents. 

Outline of History . H. G. Wells. Chapter on Marco Polo. 
The Macmillan Co., New York. 1920. 1 vol. edition. 
$5.00., 


Education 

China in the Family of Nations. See work cited under “History 
and Politics.” Chap. X, “The New Thought Movement.” 
China Today Through Chinese Eyes. Chap. II, “China’s 
Renaissance”; Chap. Ill, “The Literary Revolution in 
China.” George H. Doran Co., New York. 1923. 
$1.50. 

Christian Education in China. Committee of Reference and 
Counsel. New York. 1922, $2.00, 

Tetters from China and Jafan. John and Alice Chapman 
Dewey. E. P. Dutton Co., New York. 1923. $2.50. 

Social and Economic Conditions 

Changing Chinese , The. E. A. Ross. The Century Co., New 
York. 1911. $2.40. 

China Awakened. See work cited under “General.” 

China's Place in the Sun. Stanley High. The Macmillan 
Co., New York. 1922. $1.75. 

Farmers of Forty Centuries. F. H. King. Mrs. F. H. King. 
Madison, Wisconsin, 1911. 

Village Life in China. Arthur H. Smith, Fleming H. 
Revell Co., New York. 1899. $2.50. 

[ 179 ] 


READING LIST 

The Religions of China 

Chin a Today Through Chinese Eyes. See work cited under 
“Education.” Chap. IV, “The Confucian God-Idea”; 
Chap. V, “Present Tendencies in Chinese Buddhism.” 
Religion of the Chinese , The. J. J. M. DeGroot. The Mac¬ 
millan Co., New York. 1910. $1.25. 

Religions of Mankind , The. Edmund Davison Soper. The 
Abingdon Press, New York. 1921. $3.00. 

Three Religions of China. William Edward Soothill. 
George H. Doran Co., New York. 1913. $1.50., 

Christianity in China 

China and Modern Medicine. Harold Balme. Student 
Volunteer Movement, New York. 1921. Cloth, $1.25. 
China's Challenge to Christianity. Lucius C. Porter. 
Missionary Education Movement, New York. 1924. 
75 cents. 

China Today Through Chinese Eyes. See work cited under 
“Education.” Chap. VI, “The Impression of Christianity 
Made upon the Chinese People Through Contact with the 
Christian Nations of the West”; Chap. VII, “The Chinese 
Church.” 

In China Now. China’s Need and the Christian Contribution. 

J. C. Keyte. George H. Doran Co., New York. $1.50. 
Ming Kwongy the City of Morning Light. Mary Ninde 
Gamewell. Central Committee on the United Study of 
Foreign Missions, West Medford, Mass. 1924. 75 cents. 
New Life Currents in China. Mary Ninde Gamewell. 
Missionary Education Movement, New York. 1919. 
Cloth, 75 cents. 

Pioneering in Tibet. Albert L. Shelton.; Fleming H. 

Revell Co., New York. 1921. $1.00. 

Spread of Christianity , The. Paul Hutchinson. Chap. 
XXIII. Abingdon Press, New York. 1922. $1.50. 

[ 180 ] 


READING LIST 

Spread of Christianity in the Modem World , The. Edward 
Caldwell Moore. Chap. IX. University of Chicago 
Press, Chicago. 1919. $2.00. 

Art and Letters 

Chinese Art Motives Interpreted. Winifred V. S. Tredwell. 
G. P. Putman’s Sons, New York. 1915. $1.75. 

History of Chinese Literature. Herbert A. Giles. D. Apple- 
ton and Co., New York. 1921. 

Lute of Jade , The. Translations by Cranmer-Byng. E. P. 
Dutton and Co., New York. 1909. 50 cents. 

More Translations from the Chinese. Translated by Arthur 
Waley. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1919. $2.00. 

One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. An anthology of 
Chinese verse from the second century b.c. up to modern 
times. Translated by A. D. Waley. Alfred A. Knopf, 
New York. 1919. $2.00. 

Outlines of Chinese Art. John C. Ferguson. University of 
Chicago Press, Chicago. 1919. $3.00. 

Studies in the Chinese Drama. K. Buss, Four Seas Company, 
Boston. 1922. $5.00. 

Stories and Biographies 

Bells of the Blue Pagoda. The Strange Enchantment of a 
Chinese Doctor. Jean Carter Cochran. Westminster 
Press, Philadelphia., 1922. $1.75. 

Calvin Wilson Mateer. Forty-five Years a Missionary in 
Shantung, China. Daniel Fisher. Westminster Press, 
Philadelphia. 1911. $1.50. 

Chinese Fairy Book y The. Frederick H. and R. Wilhelm 
Martens. F. A. Stokes Co., New York. 1921. $2.50. 

Chinese Nights Entertainments. Stories of Old China. Brian 
Brown. Brentano, New York. 1922. $2.00. 

Torchbearers in China. Basil Mathews. Missionary Education 
Movement, New York. 1924. 75 cents. 

[ 181 ] 


READING LIST 


Foreign Magic* Jean Carter Cochran. Missionary Educa¬ 
tion Movement, New York. 1919. $1.50. 

Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, The Growth 
of a Work of God. Dr. and Mrs, Howard Taylor. 
Morgan and Scott, London. 1915. 

Life of Dr, Arthur Jackson of Ma.ichuria , The. Alfred J. 
Costain. Hodder and Stoughton, London. 1911. 

Ministers of Mercy, James H. Franklin. Chap. VII, 
“Peter Parker.” Chap. VIII, “John Kenneth Mackenzie.” 
Missionary Education Movement, New York. 1919, 75 

cents. 

Nathan Sites, An Epic of the East. S. Moore Sites, Fleming 
H. Revell Co., New York. 1912. $1.50. 

New Lanterns in Old China. Theodora Marshall Inglis. 
Fleming H. Revell Co., New York. 1923. $1.25. 

Noble Army , A. Ethel Daniels Hubbard. Chap. VI, 
“Service Stars” (General Feng). Central Committee on 
the United Study of Foreign Missions, West Medford, 
Mass. 1921, 65 cents. 

Notable Women of Modern China. Margaret E. Burton, 
Fleming H. Revell Co., New York. 1912. $1.50. 

Robert Morrison. Marshall Broomhall. George H. Doran 
Co., New York. $1.50. To be published. 

Servants of the King. Robert E. Speer. Chap. VI, “Eleanor 
Chesnut”; Chap. VII, “Matthew Tyson Yates.” Mis¬ 
sionary Education Movement, New York. 1909, 75 

cents. 

Shelton of Tibet, Mrs. A. R. Shelton. George H. Doran Co., 
New York. 1923. $2.00. 

Street of Precious Pearls , The. Nora Waln. The Womans 
Press, New York. 1921. 75 cents. 

Virgil C. Hart: Missionary Statesman . E. I. Hart, George H, 
Doran Co., New York. 1917. $1.50. 


[ 182 ] 














it £1 



































